Youth without Age and Life without Death
by goldenmeadow
Summary: Nascence to ending, Eliza Masen to Isabella Swan. Human suffering, supernatural horror. Waking, dreaming; wanting, needing. A fantastical reason. Vampire. Human. Man, woman, lover. Singular hope for love & the ONE thing you never thought possible. ExB, M
1. Fair

To my mega, superior, divine and eerily tuned-in beta, **Viola Cornuta**, thanks for being just completely beyond compare! And for finding the perfect fairytale.

Miss Kari, the fabulous **RowanMoon**, helped me with the Romani research…you should go read her _Broken Doll_ to see where it all came from.

**Disclaimer:** Defs born of SM's characters, they are hers…I'm just filling in their pasts and creating a new future.

I started this series in my _Men of Twilight_ challenge oneshots and felt it had to be continued. I am incredibly excited that it will now be a full length fic!

It is, above all else, a love story. Lest we forget what drew us to Twilight in the first place...I want to take you back to that place.

There will be many different POV's, but each chapter will stick to one person.

For my women at the Double Wide, because y'all blow my mind!

Here is a new beginning, a fresh first chapter, I hope you enjoy it.

~~PS. There's a hella lot of history, but it's also pretty sexy~~

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter One: Fair**

**Eliza Anis Anatolia**

My favorite folk story was told to me by my _matusa _Petronela, the rock of our family and my mother's eldest sister, who raised the Anatolia brood with _butica's_ untimely death. _Tinereţe fără de bătrâneţe şi viaţă fără de moarte._ Youth without Age and Life Without Death.

_It happened once as never before-y, 'cause if it couldn't be true, it wouldn't make a story about the time when the poplar tree made berries and the willow tree broke out in cherries, when bears began to brawl with their tails, and wolf and lamb, unfurling their sails, threw arms around each other's necks and kissed each other with brotherly pecks, when fleas put on horseshoes boldly-- ninety-nine iron weights on one leg only-- then jumped right up to the sky in its glories, and they only did it to bring us stories:  
_

_  
About the time when flies wrote themselves on the wall,  
And he's a big liar who doesn't believe this at all._

The privileged Emperor and Empress of a mythical fiefdom with their ruinous want for a child. The Handsome Son who was begot them, the hateful Woodpecker Fairy, the Scorpion Witch guarding her territory, the pontificating, wise horse carrying the prince through pitch night and lands filled with fantastical spite, gloriously terrifying sprites.

In search of youth without age and life without death, this fabled hero was embedded in me, for who didn't want those very things, and what a high cost such desire would deliver.

We were travelers, nomads…Gypsies. Some called us, in a denigrating manner, vagabonds. But we were neither transients nor beggars to be belittled. Of strong stock we rarely took notice of the condescending remarks. Smart, wily and capable, we carried our homes with us for my head would lay down to rest wherever my family was.

Romani. Of the Balkan Peninsula, the Black Sea, the Danube. Wanderers, people living off the earth, her gifts and our wits.

Soothsaying and sight-seeing went hand-in-hand and were facile occupations for our troupe; we believed in the mind's conjuring and the existence of fanciful beings. I was but one of my family tuned like a church organ to other's churlish fancies, descended from the matriarchal arch of women said to have been born of the _dialen -- _Romanish wood-spirits -- themselves with uncanny visionary abilities.

When I took a hand, when I looked closely at a stranger, I knew the insides of their minds opening like calligraphic script on parchment scrawling in black ink from the nib of their inner thoughts. Unlike some who used the notion of palm reading and fortune telling unjustly and for ill-gains, I was not a corrupt charlatan.

Nee Eliza Anis Anatolia, pledged to God, I was now Eliza Anis Anthony. Ellis Island saw the last of the Anatolians as we disembarked the the SS. Elbe in a massive Diaspora, brought from Bremen, Germany through Southampton, England to our new country with persecution nipping our heels. _Romanichal_ was the name we gave our emigrated group, arriving in 1883, just ahead of the tight closing of Lady Liberty's all-welcoming arms to Romani immigrants just two years later.

_Home._

In 1893, when we skirted through Chicago's streets lined with architectural strongholds and a balmy clover-filled scented breeze, I was thirteen. Grinning at the massed horde, I twirled in my wide pantaloons patched many times over from my scrapes with brambles and tree limbs, the tinkle of my self-made bazaar-like necklaces scattering like my youthful giggle. I'd been cosseted, had been told I was beautiful, smart as a whip and even my magpie tendency to collect every little trinket I could get my hands on -- from foreign coins to pebbles and pieces of frayed ribbon -- was indulged. Having bartered for a pair of castanets, I held the little cymbals above my head and clacked them in time to my pattering, tapping feet. The daisy chain wound round my wild coral-colored locks sank time and again to my eyes, but I just pushed it back up to my crown, shoved my untamed curls over my shoulders and carried on; enthralled at this crowd watching our descent on their beloved city to the newly renowned fairgrounds of the World's Columbian Exposition. Fabrics glittering like jewels swayed, and the Anthonys' muddle of love and humility and pride swept through the roads, as a caravan of song and sound wheezing and escalating from horns and accordion and pipes.

Spring was my preferred time of year. Chicago's World Fair was the best place to be.

The Great Fire of 1871 was a thing of the past, and the red carpet was laid down for opulence, livelihood, commingling of cultures, appreciation of industrialism, invention and grandeur.

With wide mossy eyes starved through curiosity, I hardly slept our first night; the wagon cluttered with all my treasures, my mama, my _tatal_, and their soothing words of our _patria_ in my ears slipping down with me to slumber and dreams of our homeland.

Morning found me, every day for four months, traipsing the hundreds of acres ogling the strange and wondrous sights of man's creation and imagination! Buildings that looked like Rococo fairytale palaces! Filigree and turrets and ideas to build a wedding cake upon. Flags flew color-drenched standards, countries were represented and courtiers abounded. Fresh languages sank to my ears and I knew I was a lucky nomad to be here.

Night time was an illumination against the blackening sky…streets timed with electric lights by Westinghouse showing up the luminosity of all the blanched stucco buildings. _The White City._ This place was as magical as the deep dark green and brown and fen and fallow forests of my homeland.

Spirits and otherworldly beings could live in this untimely fortress.

But a child, I could be most found at Midway Plaisance. At this center of amusements, I plied my own gifts, filling my pockets with amulets from the moneyed citizens for bouquets of wildflowers, whose fragrances were a fragile touch of frangipani and fern.

Gathering ideas and seeking out the most willing, I approached both men and women alike to fascinate them with my fortuitous skill of prescience. No matter what I saw -- and sometimes I was galled, sickened, left dirty -- I dove down like an osprey striking water and fish until I sought the gold residing inside a person's soul.

It went without saying I circumnavigated a slew of less than savory fairgoers, especially when they bellowed to me, "Hey, Gypsy girl! Come read my destiny!" Their hands cupped in places most unseemly, their red-veiny eyes yellowed at my disobedience.

For all my savviness, boldness, street knowledge, I wasn't prepared for the vision of _him_. He'd just alighted the Ferris Wheel whose turning made me feel both capricious and nauseated.

A bold child, nearing womanhood, my heart pounded out flushes of rhythm like the reaches of an organ meeting the cacophonic climax of our _Lautari_ music! He was still just a young man, but the bearing of his wide shoulders, his tallness, his long limbs spoke of manhood on the cusp.

One of his friends clapped him on the back, bantering about one thing or another, "Well, Edward, how'd you like _that_ ride?"

At that very moment, the boy who was surely no more than three years my senior caught my highlighted emerald stare and snared me with his arctic eyes of icy blue.

My breath hitched, and the flush reigning over his high crisp cheekbones had nothing to do with the racing chop of wind blowing off the manmade lagoon to our side, sifting up caplets and white waves.

Monotones of mumbled sentences and the milieu of his mates' conversation glanced off my mind and wrestled away like nothing more than dandelion fluff as I bounced on my heels and wanted closer, immediately.

Daringly, I skipped up to the statue, staring at me. He hadn't yet answered his friend. From nowhere, from nothing I'd ever known, I felt the feminine roll of my hips in my blousy skirt and my shoulders lifting up and back to pronounce the small nubile rounds of my breasts.

_Coquetry seemed a trait ingrained._

The chaff of my hair settled over my collarbone bared by the azure threaded, boat-necked shirt whose décolletage sat high enough on my throat to remain chaste.

My pull to him was like that of the Handsome Son to the keepers of the source of eternal life**.**

With a tiny tremble, his polished berry lips, carved and clean against a face that might have needed a shave in the morning, raised crookedly. Of its own mind, hypnotized, his hand lifted to catch me.

I didn't think I should be this close to him. I should have stopped, planted my feet, halted my panting breaths, turned on my heel and walked away.

Instead, I touched his tough skin with its fleshy glens and sank beneath the overwhelming precision of his netting wiles, slipped my fingers into his like trawling guiles.

This close, I saw the finesse and polish and pristine beauty of his skin! In scant seconds I'd memorized his forelock of jet hair, the shiver in his frozen-to-melted diamond-sapphire eyes. Unbelievably, he pulled my hand, clasped inside the width of his, to his chest where the _pound-pound-pound_ of his heart tore up muscle like my own.

Unthinkingly I weakened into his form, only to feel his forearm wrap around my girlish waist, bearing me up and into him.

We didn't move.

I refrained from trespassing his mind.

The Ferris Wheel starting up again woke a flock of black swans from the lake into a torrent of honking and huge flapping nightshade wings.

The bewitching charm broke.

Edward leant closer so I breathed the warm haste of his mint and candy breath and fantasized this would be my first kiss! My heart galloped and trolloped, _too close._

It took a mighty effort to stave off his ideas, _this close._

I smelled the rampant wish of the wildflowers I'd plucked earlier riddling my skin, finding sanctuary in my hair…heated, the perfume swallowed us whole. Twined with his musky aftershave I couldn't place.

He descended, his intentions unclear, and I begged my body not to fidget.

Swooping just this side of my mouth that spilled a slight moan, he hardly touched my cheek to find my ear, "Girl, I think you'd best get back to your people."

The touch of his tongue, the breadth of his chest to mine was at odds with his ornery words. Nonetheless, I recoiled like a cobra to my woven basket, eyeing him strictly.

Swiveling elegantly, Edward stretched his back and strolled to the ring of his friends and their mocking, "Little gypsy girl got to you, eh Edward?"

Listing forward, listening through the thundering of my pulse and my sprung ire, I heard his response, "Shut up, Cords. You're a disgrace to your family." Then, in an undertone, he mentioned gravely, "_She's beautiful. She knows me."_

One final time, he looked back. A damp frost to his Siberian orbs, an icy barrage following his proclamation, a succinct nod in my direction, sending me on my somber way.

I wished I'd taken in his internal meanderings, just to see what he really thought of me.

That Handsome Son.

_~~ll~~_

We returned, with our wares and crafts a vivacious exhibitionism to Chicago's fairgrounds in 1899.

This play palace was not near as whimsical as it'd been six years earlier, but I was even giddier. Blinded by the intrigue of girlish fancies, I'd waited, toiled, troubled, trembled with every annum, knowing we were coming closer and closer to this fixed point from whose fulcrum my past would flitter away and my future would unfurl.

Our number had multiplied to include spouses and children. I was still waiting. Aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews…we were _ghicitoare_ and sorceresses, _rudari_ and _zlătari – _wood crafters and goldsmiths.

And most exceptionally, bear trainers!

Most sensually…musicians, singers, and dancers.

As a fortune teller, a _ghicitoare_, I didn't need to touch the lines running in plump rivers up the hills of my patrons' palms to see their fate, but I held each person before reading the present, binding it to the future, like a forest nymph searching out the caress of the one who was meant to be mine.

Pounding out our native pattern, my Uncle Caspar and his sons Dukker, Emaeus, and Mihali were a _taraf_ playing the _lăutărească _music with its complicated, intense improv rythms on their upright bass, panflute, the dulcimer-like tambal, and the reed instrument caval. Clapping and tapping their feet, the crowds parted slowly, a lithe chink openining in the armor of the audience as one man shouldered through, drawn by the music and us women dancing the _Oro._ The tempo shivered us through a circular dance, to a straight line, jumping and skipping, hopping and keeping up an intricate design like snake charmersworking from one end of the throng to the other.

To shouts of, "Eliza, Eliza," the tempo rapidly changed. Grinning and ribald, I loosened my shawl with its peacock tones and tethered it to my waist. Thready silken tassels hung down one hip while the other side formed a triangle of cloth that fitted my opposite thigh and dangled below my knee.

Forward thinkers, we embraced the New World, the melting pot mélange, and I'd taken up the Andalusian Flamenco as another expression of my Traveler heritage.

Effortlessly, my relatives transformed their beat to a sensuous tone, the ring widened, I felt eyes stunned to every movement of my hips, waist and shoulders. With the amplification of the music, finding the eyes soldered to my heady dance, I pulled my wrap up again and swept a matador's veronica.

This bull had a dark forelock sitting across his brow, which he blew up in a huff of breath to reveal the hoarfrost eyes I still remembered every night.

I was bolder, older. A woman, nearly. Just waiting for a man's touch to replace my own. I'd come back here, happily, _knowing_.

For all my confidence and flamboyance, if this particular man demeaned me, I would be crushed.

Crescendoing to reverberating applause, I held my pose but for a moment before gathering my shawl, my bouquets of flowers from the outside of the ring, and hurried to the man whose look gored me as if with horns.

Six years ago, he'd been just out of boyhood. Now he stood head and shoulders above his peers and the look in his eyes had taken a lascivious, probing gleam.

_Edward._

My full hips still moved to the echo of the earthy music. My hands sweated around the stalks of my flowers, for I was still both a _florare_ and a clairvoyant.

Lashed by the magnitude of feeling looping between us, people shunted aside and made an open path between the colorful Romani young woman and the upright young man.

Straight and tall and beautiful. Breathtaking! In his lightweight dove gray suit emphasizing the brawny muscles of his shoulders, the inverted triangle of his chest, the pleated placket of his trousers accentuating his narrow hips and long, lean legs, he held his brilliant white Panama Hat by the ends of his fingertips. He was the picture of elegance and repose but for the clenching of his jaw and the hazardous snapping of his eyes. And, _Doamne!_, that jaw was edged with white sharp bone that looked so erotic, I wanted to lick from his hairline to that strutting jut just beneath and down from his ear. He looked…_mature._

Above his ruddy lip, tickling the bow indenting it, was a slim mustache as inky as the hair on his head.

I wished to run my finger between that finely trimmed fringe and his mouth until he took my finger inside.

Breathless by the time I reached him, I offered a spray of peonies in the same crimson as the plush dais of his mouth, its whisper of nights spent in heathenish delights, its call like the open-road and windblown curtains. "Flowers, sir?" I archly questioned, knowing he wasn't interested in the blossoms at all.

"Flowers have no call to me," he stated, the incandescence of his Poseidon eyes slaking their thirst around my halo of undomesticated hair, "Fruit, perhaps." A secret smile played upon his lips and pulled me in closer than was strictly prudent. Biting down on what seemed to be a grin and a chuckle, he continued his flirtation, "_Strawberry_…blond." The further whipping of his look down my body tightened around me like a whalebone corset, crushing my breath and heaving my breasts upward, a lacing that constricted even more with his next saucy proclamation, "Candy floss hair…_is there more?_"

Perhaps I wasn't of his social standing, I'd no doubt he interpreted my increased breathing describing my titillation correctly, but indeed that didn't mean he could overstep the boundaries of propriety and demean my breeding!

As before, once again, I flinched as if slapped.

The apple bloom on his cheeks bleached and he looked aghast, "_Christ,"_ he muttered, shifting his feet on the ground, frowning down at his polished leather boots, finally bending at his knees to meet my insulted visage, my undimmed glare.

"I'm sorry, that was uncalled for and completely ungentlemanly. I've never thought something like that, let alone uttered it aloud in the company of the fairer sex! You do something to me, Miss." Even shaken with self- disgust and turpitude, his voice was tenorous.

The sincerity of his apology evident, I placated, "You just caught me off guard. _And you do something to me too, Mister…?"_

A cajoling sprinkle of white sparkled his eyes. Covering his head, stepping back a few paces, he began anew and my head dizzied at the sight of this stunning creature with his dappling smile tucking up to his moustache. He took the flowers from my clasp and laid them on the verge, first. He kept hold of my wrist and lifted it to his mouth, second. The heat of his breath sluiced over my knuckles. He bowed low and gestured his hat down to my feet with a flourish, third. My legs trembled, my eyes clamped shut to feel the brush of bristle and soft at my fingertips, then pressing into the heart of my palm. Still bent over my hand, he looked up through the feathers of his eyelashes and had I been a weaker woman I'd surely have swooned from that look alone! "Edward John Masen. _Miss?_"

A touch of the smug scoundrel littered back over his bountiful expression, creeping up into a smirk lifting his high cheekbones and wrinkling the corners of his eyes. A caged thing, my heart tried to jerk out through my breastbone.

Clearing my throat, I looked anywhere but at him, until I recalled the way he'd watched me dancing as if I held, already, his heart in my hand. He stood straight, so erect and tall and of unbearably perfect posture. My eyes reached his when I tilted my neck up, and my own face juggled into a warm smile, "Eliza Anis Anthony."

He stroked his chin and perused me again, not quite extinguishing the craving slipping over him, "Are you married, Eliza Anis Anthony?"

Pushing my hands to my hips, I jutted my chin so the temeritous dimple in it pointed skyward, "No, sir. And you, Edward John Masen?"

At my challenge and swagger, he laughed so beautifully my own answered, and I knew before he said it, "No, ma'am," with a wink.

Shyly, I wondered, "Do you remember me?" Edward wasn't of my ilk. Nor I of his, but a touch, a look, a glimpse, and he would be mine. As before I'd slinked away from his imaginings soon as I saw him, but now I had to see -- _Rich truffles, black forests, fawns galloping in the gloamy thick loam and decaying autumn leaves, blowing frothy streams of frost from their blaring nostrils. She is wild. Miss Anthony is unlike anyone I've ever met, and I've met her before –_ yes, he remembered me_._

This time he asked permission, nodding to my waist and extending his hand, "May I?" I nodded. His touch, his fingers slipping into the indentation and holding on, he pulled me a couple steps closer.

"Yes, Eliza, I remember you. Cotton candy hair, and sugar-spun smiles. Flowers," Edward nodded down to my forgotten goods, "and fortune telling. _My little gypsy girl._" His warmth colluded inside of me, his chin topped my crown we were so close. He inclined and I leaned forward and our chests nearly touched on his next words, "Will you read my palm?"

Shaking my head so a nest of snarls curled into his neck, I declined. I had no wish to know what my heart was already full of. Muffled a hairsbreadth away from the starched collar of his very clean shirt, I traded as I was wont to do, "Shall I tell you a _tot o poveste populara_ instead?"

_A fairytale._

_~~ll~~_

_Like the beautiful fairy princesses who stood apart from the hourglass of time, housed in their glass palace like it was an unbreakable coffin in which they breathed and lived but never aged, and the moat swimming around it tasted of the Fountain of Youth, there was told a folk story of a Teutonic family of fair maidens. The Higgin clan. It was said their touch disarmed the passage of time, and ceased its clip-clopping motion._

Edward John and I were wed in 1900.

Looking ahead, my _familia_ extended their well wishes. There'd been no child marriage for me, no dowry paid aside from my trousseau and the heirlooms passed to me through matrimony. This was one small step in becoming the head of my family; my authority would only be cemented with the birth of my first child, as ruled by _Romanichal _customs.

His Masen kin were, at first, less inclined. Fortunate and favored by fate, they looked to me as gold-digging, dirty hobo undeserving of their only son.

The night of our announcement to society at large made a hothead of my quiet, calm, cool betrothed. Sniggers and titters and smirks behind the crystal coupes of Bollinger made him nearly savage! He stormed to the terrace with me towed behind him. He only calmed when his arms wrapped around me, crushing my variegated ivy gown, a more debilitating, diaphanous affair than I was used to, with its small train and cumulus leg-o'-mutton sleeves tapering to my thin wrists with a lengthy row of mother-of-pearl buttons. The corset was unfamiliar and constricting, my hair contained in a French Twist, and the low décolletage, whose dips to the swell of my breasts was followed by Edward John's frosty eyes thawing to something hotter as he exclaimed, "This is balderdash!"

I caressed his face and leant up to kiss his mouth, a touch I'd never weary of, my glittering bejeweled ring caught light in a prism and sent it back out in rainbows. "_Shhh_, my love, you think a Romani streetwise gypsy woman can't handle a roomful of common vipers?" I joked before kissing him more deeply so the muscle of our tongues took residence in his mouth then mine.

The narrow gap of his heated lavender eyes assured me he felt in better health. The grip of his hand upon my buttocks as we reentered the brownstone made me yearn for what was to come with our consummation…all the while I slapped at his hand and begged closer with my striving hips.

We parted at the twinned double doors on either side of the hall, feminine laughter behind one, clotting smoke and bold jests behind the other, "Give 'em hell, Eliza," Edward John stole one more slip over my hip and far too near my breast to be gallant, but neither of us cared.

With strength and cunning and coyness, not to mention a little bit of my own intrinsic ability, I was capital. Capitol? – I giggled because that was such an Edward John phrase. In the drawing room of the Masen manse while the men adjourned to the smoking parlor – I had to assure Edward John that all was right and I was thoroughly able to handle and captivate the Masen matriarchy.

It was entertaining to watch my mama and _matusa_ Petronela with their parlour games, charismatically bringing first one then another woman into their tightly woven magnet webs.

The unfamiliar Belle Epoque habille threatened to hobble me, but I was determined to prove myself a worthy lady, in my own right. A fast learner with an agile mind, my alluring gift aided me.

The grande-dame of the dynasty sat regally in a high-backed chair; forbidding, poised, she kept her aquiline nose high in the air as if she didn't see me. With tenacity, I straightened my shoulders and perched beside her, "Mrs. Masen," I held out my hand to her, "May I?" Not one wit of emotion strained the clinical mask of her features, though she flinched as if from the touch of a leper. "Come now, I don't bite," I inveigled.

With a deep, long-suffering sigh, she presented herself to me with an open palm. My eyelids shuttered down, and I concentrated on the furrowed silken planes of her elderly flesh, frail yet stalwart. I sought one line within the many drawings of her life. What I felt and what I saw sent a serene smile over my lips. Opening my eyes, I delivered, "You have loved fully."

The break in her daunting façade showed for but a moment. Drawn by my hypnotic seaglass eyes, she leaned to me as I reclined closer to whisper this woman's long-kept secret, "It was not your husband you gave your heart to."

The armor fell away, briefly but completely. She grabbed my wrist with that steely strength I'd viewed, "My dear, you do not know! How can you fathom…_he wasn't of my standing._ _My Frederich_," his appellation was an absolution to the past forty-eight years of a loveless marriage.

"I feel it, because what you were never allowed to reciprocate, _that love,_ is exactly what I have for your grandson. Perhaps the fates will be kinder to us?"

With the elder Mrs. Masen's staunch approval, I was welcomed, not with entirely open arms but with respect bordering on admiration, to the fold as _Elizabeth_ _Anthony_ Masen.

The adjustment wasn't easy or altogether pleasant as I said goodbye to my own family who carried on in their drifting ways while I made of myself a matron of the arts and charities, now one of Chicago's elites. Ladies luncheons, home making, and always, _always_, making love with my husband.

We made new traditions while I clung to some of my old. I didn't forego my Christian Orthodoxy for his Protestantism, and that was a bone of contention only smoothed by the reality of how silly it was to fight about religion when we possessed such heavenly love.

I held fast to certain _marime,_ purity laws. Hair cuttings were to be burnt, and nails to be filed instead of clipped so as not to leave an essence of our bodies for misfortune to find and use against us.

The taboo on the lower body and genitalia stood not a chance, not with the heart-stopping erotic night time pleasures Edward John introduced me to until I felt, at least after dark, more his mistress than his wife.

In high society, at important functions, I the wife of the ridiculously attractive, enterprising next-in-line president of Masen Furriers, and he the husband who was no longer seen as mismatched by his exotic, striking, red-haired spouse, it was all above board, aside from the reminiscent slight nudge across my buttocks with the rasp of his knuckles so the thick, gold ring on his pinkie scoured my flesh with flaming desire reflecting in his snowdrift bedroom eyes. Our societal roles intact, I charmed and enticed and entertained while Edward John made contacts, cut deals and lavishly donated half as much money as his worth toward philanthropic undertakings.

Generous to a fault was he, especially in the bedroom.

At home, Edward John liked me in a corset, chemise, my drawers – all ornately trimmed in ribbon with ruffles of chiffon, the garments creating a feminine S-shape he admired for minutes at a time -- and barefoot with my hair let down in fiery waves to my waist, without the finery and frippery. Because for all our rank and position, he was still my Fairground Boy and I his Gypsy Girl.

In passing on my way to the range I nudged the toes of his calfskin boots as he read the broadsheet, propped against the doorjamb, feeling a delicious thrill as he ran his look, austere to steadfastly sexual, over my very nearly nude body.

He liked a home cooked meal, my husband did.

He rarely waited until after dessert to take me, any damn place he wanted.

Beneath the starch and new aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the cultural commitments, Edward John was a carnal creature, an ardent lover.

The way he licked his fork clean made sly butterflies flutter inside my tummy. When it clattered to his cleared plate, I bit my lower lip, the whalebones confining my chest straining.

My carriage was held upright with my breath gusting tightly inside the bone-lined linen limits.

Edward John watched the rise and fall, and looked to my mouth, his bearing rigid.

I stood.

He scraped back his chair with nary a though to the polished tiles.

I gathered the cutlery and china.

He ran his index finger beneath his fine, ticklish, black mustache.

Turning my back, my feet _slap-slapped _on the marble, just like our flesh, naked, writhing, against each other.

I swayed my hips.

Looked over my shoulder, I took in my _sotul's _eyes darkening, narrowing, pinpointing the precise motion of my bottom, the bared flesh at the base of my spine, the keys of my back and the keyed up muscles at the start of my neck.

His breath preceded his lips licking from the round of one nude shoulder to the other, pushing the tiny capped sleeves lower.

Propelling me to the parlor, he pressed my hands to the mantle and held my hips far away from the blissful flames of the coal fire.

I steadied in several breaths, he ran his hand down the criss-crossed lacing that held my flesh away from him.

To my front, across my bodice, Edward John cupped my breasts and sank his fingers into the valley created by man's gilded cage, "I could just take you like this, _Eliza,_" I moaned greedily, he only ever called me by my given name when we made love, "But I'd hate for you to faint from lack of breath."

At the encouragement of his fingers, my head turned so our lips met and the itch of his groomed mustache to my mouth swayed over me before the lush firmness of his tongue turned and twisted into my mouth.

"_Dragostea mea,_" I hushed into his neck when he released me, "My love, set me free."

"With pleasure, _hold tigh_t, Eliza." He yanked the bow from the binding and inched his deft fingers between fabric and skin, unwinding the bond, marking the intake of deep breath that lifted my arse up against his erection, and tilted my breasts to his hands now completely enveloping me.

"Better?"

I rolled my hips and reveled in his groan, "Oh, _yes."_

The corset slipped to the floor, and I swiveled around. My _lubita,_ my lover, dashed the negligent camisole and bloomers away, swatting my inner thighs in demanding play.

Grabbing my ample hips, braiding his tapered fingers to my disheveled tresses, he bore me to the settee with a smirk teasing his lips.

I kissed that smirk right off of him.

He retaliated by slowly, _oh so slowly,_ unbuttoning his shirt, lifting off his loosened tie, pulling open his expensive tailored trousers. Further blighting me, he opened the top of his pants just enough I could see the thick trail of black-brown hair leading to his shaft, but nothing more, while he reached for my tits with the same subtle, wanton smile as always. His thumbs ramped down my nipples gently, knowing the tenderest touch on my breasts made me savage. With his attention, the buds peaked, perked, turned bright red at the top and deep pink around the circling areole. He hefted the weight, and slid his fingers underneath the base curves; against the corner of my mouth where I could hardly breath he repeated his hymn to my breasts, "I love the shape of you, like a teardrop." Edward John lifted my full bosom up to his lowing mouth, suckling, nuzzling, "I love to make your tits smile like this."

Eroticism was heavier than the amber liquid of our nightly cognac in the cut-glass tumblers on the side table and my head lashed, my back arched, my hands triggered to the stiffness still hidden.

I backed away, he begged, "Wench, why do you starve me of your charms?"

Volleying, I shot back, "Husband, take off your breeches."

He complied.

The heliotrope head of his shaft mesmerized me as it danced in thin air, an arc of flesh so stiff, soft, hard, and dynamic, I beseeched with my magical hands, my beguiling eyes, my undulating hips in a makeshift, age-old dance until he came to me.

When close enough, I dallied over the brightening, hardening taut heart of his cock, linked my fingers to take him wholly and stroked powerfully up and down, watching the clinch of his abdominals, the strain in the ligaments of his neck, the shiver touching chills to his biceps and chest.

He stayed my movements with hands at my shoulders, and sat away, on the chaise longue. His finger crooked, hooked, captivated me closer, until I stood between the brawn of his thighs and he pointed to his piece, "Come on top of me, Eliza," he ordered, in an erotic, no-nonsense tone.

Elixir, remedy, balm and poison all mashed into one, his penis lanced me as I sat astride him! The power made me bow back so hard my hair hit his feet planted mightily on the carpet, and he had to hold my rocking body in place.

Regained from the instance of entrance, I sat up with my hands on his chest, rubbing his nipples, leaning to wetly kiss those brazen lips, the square jaw, the tight ropes of his neck, I prayed, "_Edward John._"

I gyrated slowly until his breath chugged deadly. My calves trembled into cramps.

"Eliza Anis Anatolia!" he became uncontained, a zephyr, a Zeus, an ardent erotic lover who had me begging, in a most unladylike fashion – like the child I used to be with bruised, scabby, filthy knees, my dress awry, my hair ajumble, pleading for a bit of licorice.

Now I beseeched for his manhood.

And he was, as ever, profoundly beneficent; pelvis clenching, hips lifting in a volcanic rupture from the cushions while holding down on my shoulders until the effervescent frown of climax solidified my face and narrowed my vision until all I saw was the pounding, terrifyingly beautiful absence of everything!

"_MY GOD!" _he jammed up into me several more times 'til we both sagged, bonelessly, to the chaise.

A searing chuckle rumbled Edward John's chest beneath my cheek and flattened hair, "Was that your idea of dessert, my love, _or is there more_?"

_~~ll~~_

_There was once a great emperor and an empress, both young and beautiful. Wishing to have children, they did many times over everything that had to be done about that. They went on journeys to wizards and wise men who could search the stars and tell if they might have children, but in vain. Finally, hearing that there was a cunning old man in a nearby village, the emperor sent for him. The old man, however, looked the king's messenger straight in the eye and said that the ones needing help should come to him. Having heard as much, the emperor and empress gathered several great lords, together with soldiers and servants, and their highnesses brought themselves to the gray beard's house. When the old man saw them coming, he went out to greet them right away._

_  
--Welcome in good health! he said. But what are your majesties traveling to find? The wish you have will bring you sorrow. _

_  
--I didn't come to ask you that, said the emperor. If you have some remedy which will make us have children, give it to me. _

_  
--I have, said the old man, but you will have one child only. He will be the Handsome one, the most dear Son, and you shall have no joy of him._

We weren't long-married before I miscarried our first baby.

Another four months meant a second loss.

This night, I wore my silk scarf wrapped majestically around my head, my capacious skirts glittering with jewels and sparkling gem tones. Hosting a fancy dress party, only I was being my true self.

The stays for my morning dress had already been loosened.

I was five months pregnant, at least I reckoned from the time of my last menses. Approaching our first anniversary, I felt…_him_ quickening in the marrow of my bones, in the _thud_ of my heart, my organ pumping within me and umbilically into our son.

The glow inside me couldn't be diminished. The cherubic roundness of my formerly lean face compelled Edward John to stroke me whenever he was near, wanting so much to have me though I cautioned against it.

October's ghouls beat at our doors and hard frost made spirals and webbed paintings on the windows, but inside there was ease and friendship and hope.

Richly flavored and highly spiced dishes of pork, and hominy, meat jelly, and sweet breads were a counterpoint to imported wines, _Feteasca _and _Grasa._

On the gramophone I played the records reminding me of my traveling, wayward youth, hoping only to bring a young one of my own to this world.

As the feasting dwindled, I strolled over palms and cards by firelight, the gas lamps at a low flicker. Frivolously, I gave my gifts to my friends who'd accepted me as a genteel, well-heeled woman and an heiress to a fortune of Western European legacy.

All the while I discreetly massaged my belly.

A tough rap at the door ended the evening on a sour note. The low voice of my husband turned rocky, the harangue of my own language was hasty as they spoke in the vestibule.

Opening the door, I saw one of my own. A sage, an elderly woman whose splicing eyes were more youthful than the tangent folds of skin and flaps of wrinkles making squashed plum of her face.

Rapidly, she spoke to me, explaining she knew my family by song and dance and fair, far and wide. Taking a gold amulet from her pocket, she waved it before my face and tucked her free hand into my elbow, guiding me back inside. Edward John was anxious, fraught, until I nodded to him complacently.

"_Femeie inteleapta_, is all right with the Anatolias?"

My heart pounded fat blood and I felt the babe kick its heels for the first time!

The smoky cavern of her voice found me like a bee charmer, "They are well, _copilul meu._" _My child_. My child was beginning to move inside me, somersaulting it felt like, in his gestation!

"You are with child, Eliza?"

"Yes," of their own, my hands wrapped around the little roundness of my stomach.

She came at my face and gripped my shoulders, only to ease down and waylay the fright her actions caused…and again, to cause further unease with these words, "_Mortality will be eclipsed for _his _love is a machination of the future. Whatever you believe, Eliza, you know in your heart, phantoms live and humanity reins."_

It must have been the clammy heat, the small drink I'd had, the long cigarette. Whatever the means, I held that eerie hallucination like a talisman to ward off bad luck

Even the witch had said he'd be born.

_~~ll~~_

_Right before the hour of birth, the child put up such a storm of weeping that no wizard was able to console him. Then the emperor began to pledge the child all the good things in the world, but neither was he able to quiet him, though he did everything in his power._

_  
--Be quiet, Daddy's dear one, the emperor said, and I'll give you this or that kingdom; be quiet son, and I'll give you this or that emperor's daughter to wive, and a lot of other things like that. Finally, when the emperor saw over and over again that the child wouldn't be still, he said on top of that: be quiet my son and I'll give you youth without age and life without death._

With the birth of Edward Anthony Masen, I was tied to this world as never before!

My earth revolved around him, Edward John the guiding sun that protected us, doted on us, provided for us, and remained my first love.

But the love I felt for young Edward was ineffable! Every squint of his eyes turning from newborn wishy-washy blue to the deepest tint of forest green, the curl of his teeny fist around my finger, his rosebud mouth opening in a yawn or the strangest, funniest little expressions littering across his face plummeted mother-love down to the pit of my belly and made my heart beat faster.

I could look at him for hours without blinking or tiring. Months after his nascence,I still felt the phantom kicks and wiggles of his residence inside my womb, a sensation I'd never know again because he was to be our only child.

In a manner I'd never have been able to imagine previously, Edward John and I were fulfilled, filled to bursting with ripe affection and devotion and tenderness for this wee bairn!

With a squeal much bigger than his small frame, my babe called down my milk in a flow of rich, thick liquid rendering to a lighter drink the longer he suckled.

Sometimes I simply had to smell him for my breasts to fill with nourishment. From his begetting, Edward's fragrance had been different, heady, other-worldly. Some tell of the perfume of saints, as if in canonization their bodies become imbued with the bouquet of fresh fields of flowers.

That's how Edward always smelled to me as I nuzzled the pudgy rolls of his neck and the softest folds of his elbows.

As he grew from infancy to toddlerhood to childhood, the years passing too quickly at a frantic clip, more Anatolian portents became apparent; Edward knew far too much about people than could be explained by anything other than my own unique perception of the mind's eye.

At the shore, gathering freshwater shells and inspecting limpets and leavings of Lake Michigan, Edward raced up and down the beach with shouts of belly rumbling laughter, chasing off seagulls and flapping his own wings in search of taking flight! He approached anattractivelady, landing at her feet with a spray of wet tidal mud. I heard his stammered apology and watched the peachy blush fly up his plump cheeks. As I stood to approach, the woman leaned down and cupped his bonny face, and with a grieving smile opening only to him she whispered, "That's okay, dear boy. This old dress was headed for the wash line anyway." Patting his head, she sent him on his way, back to me where his eyes coalesced stormy and viridian as the wavelets beneath a thunderous sky.

By the time we reached each other, Edward's expression was somber and, in his six-year-old lisp, he reckoned knowingly, "That lady is sad, mummy."

Over the sand, I met her eyes, and nodded.

Her own young son had died not a year and a half before of sepsis.

A curiosity, he was a first in the Anatolia family. The first male with the ability to summon other's thoughts.

We raised him as an American and a Romanian. The music, rituals, food, lore, and religion of both my and the Masen ancestors were folded into Edward in a sincere and homey method.

Most importantly, I wished him to have the freedom of his childhood as I did! Getting dirty, collecting ornaments wherever he found them – beach, park, during a walk down the road to the bustling square – climbing trees and building fortresses and making friends from strangers at every turn.

A consummate dancer, an accomplished piano player, as Edward grew older, he accompanied his father and me while we turned about the parlour. He took his own stance before me, at thirteen already taller than me, his shoulders filling out to a man's proportions, and gracefully applied me across the floor.

_~~ll~~_

_The more the child grew, the more quick-witted and daring he became. They sent him to schools and philosophers, and all the teaching that other children learned in one year, he learned in a month, so much so that the emperor was dying and resurrecting for joy. The whole country prided itself that it would have an emperor as learned and wise as Solomon. From that time forward, however-- I don't know what Handsome Son had wrong with him that he was all melancholic, sad and lost in thoughts. _

How I hated time that took Edward so speedily from baby to almost-man even while I gloried in the articulate, talented, striking adult he was becoming.

His hair was darker than mine, bronze and copper, but just as feral as my own. His eyes were celery green and clean with all his emotions baldly demonstrated, his chiseled features and athletic build all Masen. I giggled in the hall outside the bath when Edward John showed his son how to shave just so with the straight razor, then felt my heart slow to a stop at my handsome son's clean-cut jaw and autumn hair and flushed cheeks when he emerged.

He rolled his eyes at my reaction and sighed with a smile, "Oh, mum. It's just a shave."

Edward John was more stoic about Edward's anterior aptitude than he was with mine…a father's worry for his son's standing and concern over what his future might entail. We spent so many nights talking in between the torrid trysts still marking our ecclesiastical passion.

I wondered if Edward ever heard us, at the opposite end of the house. Now that he was an adolescent and then some, I wished him to find his own flirtations. But I'd adopted the policy of never searching out his thoughts, and he did the same for me.

He was sixteen, and so beautiful!

Perceived as too insular, so that his shy aloofness appeared pompous, Edward became almost worryingly reserved. Redoubling my efforts, I worked vigor and more and more and more of my maternal love into him.

I couldn't help it because I blamed myself…had he been around my people at all, his skill wouldn't have appeared so outlandish.

Every week, year in and year out, we sat in the plaza, admiring the hustle and bustle, admitting our gifts, and I shuddered at the unwholesome thoughts aimed at my son by glassy-eyed, mauling strange women.

_Surely, there was one for him._

How I loved nothing more than a houseful of his friends, an all too rare occurrence. In this instance, a houseful was never more than three or four for my modest Edward. Booms of boyish laughter and tussles and unending snacking were my reward, and Edward's was the connection he built with his mates Whit and Carty.

I taught him there was nothing to be ashamed of in his physical body, no need to worry over his manly needs so long as he gave proper respect to both himself and the woman he desired.

In answer to my forthright chats, Edward jittered his leg, tumbled the coins in his pocket, looked both sheepish and emboldened.

I didn't know how to read him anymore.

Times had changed. Skirts had lifted, corsets loosened, collars displayed more tantalizing flesh and fine-boned ankles were readily seen.

The Great War was approaching from across the archaic mountains, the Danube, the spiny scrawl and sprawl of Europe, reaching its Reaper's fingers out and calling to our own boys.

I wanted so much for him to meet the woman he'd love eternally! Secretly I hoped that would keep him from signing up.

One night, passing his bedchamber, I heard a muffled, strained whisper, "_Isabella."_

_~~ll~~_

_But it happened one day when the child had just turned fifteen years old and the emperor was to be found at table celebrating with wine and song among all the lords and seneschals of the kingdom that Handsome Son stood up and said: _

_  
--Father, the time has come to give me what you promised me at birth. _

_  
Hearing this, the emperor became very sad, and he said to him: _

_  
--But look, son, where can I get such an unheard of thing as that to give you? And if I promised you then, it was only to quiet you down. _

_  
--If you can not give it to me, Father, then I must need scour the whole world until I find the pledge for which I came into this life. _

_  
Then all the lords and the emperor threw themselves on their knees, with pleas that he not leave the kingdom. And the lords added: _

_  
--Since your father is an old man from here on out, we shall raise you to the throne, and we shall also bring you the most beautiful empress under the sun for a wife. _

_  
But they couldn't turn Handsome Son from his resolution. He stuck to his word like a rock so that when his father saw that over and over again, he gave him his leave and planned vittles for the trip and all things needful._

It should have come as no surprise. Carty and Whit had already enlisted. It was 1918. That war had grounded itself in our very lives even from across the vast Atlantic.

Edward joined rank and file.

Deep in my bones, a sagging despair that wouldn't be displaced clung to me.

My passionate, artistic, quiet son, if only I could keep him safe from harm, I'd employ any means necessary!

Edward John listened to me railing, bitter tears tightening my face and mottling my skin with the rash of weeping. He held me while I hit and scratched. He lifted me to our bed and made me forget, in all the magnificently sensuous ways his body still moved over and into and around mine.

Afterward, he held me for dear life, and I like him to a life preserver, because he too knew there were no more guarantees.

Not long now, a few weeks left. I'd pleaded with him to reconsider, to go off to school if he needed space, anything but to put his existence in danger so blindly, so trustingly.

Steadfast as his father, Edward never wavered.

In the end, I made up his kit, sewed and stitched and joined the Ladies Auxiliary, started working in the wards at St. Luke's Hospital, so my time was already divvied between Edward and the occupations I'd have to take my mind off his peril to come.

I purchased scented stationery and new pens and inks. Because I would write him every day.

As a parting gift, I took Edward to The Majestic to see Swan Lake.

We made quite a pair; me in my evening gown and finest mink stole, my son in his tuxedo.

Focused on the dance and music and artistry as the ballet jetted across the stage, Edward was mindless to the gaggle of women surrounding him. For once, I was thankful, as I'd not have syrupy young Tanya getting her claws into him.

Before intermission ended, I returned to our private box where Edward had remained. The curtain lifted ahead of me as a man departed with the words, "Do please forgive me, young sir, I seem to have misplaced my party," hanging behind him. He nodded pleasantly at me and held the closure aloft for my entrance.

In the vestibule, that man's ambrosial cologne saturated the air. Honey and sun-dew and something akin to my son. Looking after him, I watched the slinky predatory nature of his gait. There was a connection just beyond my immaculate reach as his mind shifted like the heavy carnelian velvet drapes swishing across the stage in preparation for the second half.

Quickly dancing and flipping up motes of dust, blurring the exceptional veined wood of his past, his being, the swags shut me out.

In his retreat, I detailed this man. Godlike, sleek as the Phaeton carriage polished to a brilliant sheen enshrined and unused in the outbuilding at the Masen's mansion. Proud and determined and shining as the pantheon demi-god Phaëton on his chariot, seeking knowledge.

A phantom…as I'd been forewarned by the Romanichal witch.

I did see one thing.

He possessed youth without age, life without death. _He _was the young, handsome prince inside the castle.

For he was _vampyre._

Suddenly, I knew only one thing; _fairytales are true and immortals walk among us. _Not in palaces guarded by mythical fairies inhabiting magical realms and circled by savage animals, but here, shoulder-to-shoulder_._

Even for all my insight into Freudian, flickering minds, I could never have foreseen the swift tide of fortunes changing.

_Ki shan i Romani-- Adoi san' i chov'hani_

_Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know._

_

* * *

  
_

~Thoughts on this very first chapter? Please review~

Carlisle is next.

If you want to chat about this or any of my other stories (and for something entirely different, you should check out the fuck-hot, and frickin' hilarious Southern AU story, _Dead Confederates_), come on down to my thread on the Twilighted forums. Link on my profile.

The name comes from the Romani fairytale I referenced throughout (the passages in italics, apart from the bit about the Higgin family): Tinereţe fără de bătrâneţe şi viaţă fără de moarte: Youth Without Age and Life Without Death written by Petre Ispirescu.

Kinda stole a bit from _Jane Eyre, _too.

**Just so y'all know, I fully intended to get on the replies for _Surrender _(WOW), _Jealousy, _and _Dead Feds_ tonight 01/08/2010...but fuckfic had other notions. I apologize, and it is my promise to get back to y'all this weekend for every review for all my fics. I LOVE nothing more than talking to you lovely ladies**, **so if you have something to say to me, now's the time :). I just wanted to get Eliza out to you first. **

Rie~


	2. Fanfiction mucked up the alerts AN

Sorry for the fake-out. Obviously this is not a new chapter but just an alert (one I hope reaches your inboxes) to say I posted a new story, _Youth without Age and Life without Death_, on Friday, but due to EPIC fanfiction fail I think many of you never received the alert. I know I didn't. So, if you care to join me on this fresh journey, please be so kind as to read chapter one, _Fair_, and let me know what you think!

Oh, and a little something from Navarre who did get to read/review chapter one to wet your appetites: _"This story ignites the fires of imagery, beauty, fire, passion, and make believe. It reminds me of the fairytales of old."_

Ta and much love,

Rie~


	3. Plea

Lovely thanks and all the regard in the world to my most skilled and beautiful betas:** Viola Cornuta and vanessarae!**

**Disclaimer:** Again, I just made stuff up, based on the story and its characters.

**Couple of quick notes:**

The lovely ms-ambrosia made me a banner, it's on my profile. It's vintage, fab, stunning!

I want to say ta to **dragonflyidt** for letting me use her for Romani and Romanian information!

Obvs, the most naughty and unlikely love to my Dead Confed ladies, holding down the Double Wide trailer.

Oh, and apologies for the fake chapter two; it was all alert nonsense. I have a lot of fanarkles with fanfiction.

~~Read on~~

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Two: Plea**

**Carlisle Cullen**

I took another turn through the infirmary.

The gas lights dimmed and then flickered back to cast a wash of muted, orange gloam, while the smell of burning fuel floated about the long room where over-washed and dull curtains hung between cast beds, only enclosing those most close to leaving life.

The others--those hanging on by mere threads of life's thinning course--were in plain view. Lines and lines of human suffering. Shifting, curling, moaning, whimpering, curdling screams as an infestation of morbidity turned tissue to juice.

One by one, the cots had emptied. Influenza was a miasmic disease that culled through the population in complete socialist disregard to race, stature, religion, wealth.

In this country, they were all equals. Uniformly, unequivocally bound to the rampage of a malicious malaise that stampeded from scullery maid to houseboy, heiress to master of the house; master at arms to brothel owner.

I alone was safe. Here, in Chicago, 1918 at St. Luke's Hospital.

I would forever be untouched by ailment, apart from the thirst for human blood that gripped my throat in its tight, unrelenting chokehold. It was a visceral, yet no less viral clutch upon my innards, and though they did not move, they still felt the pain of want.

Carnage came in many forms, as did the blight on imagination of bizarre beasts; some real, others not. I'd personally viewed, front row and center, most of them in my very long time on this earth.

Gargoyles, those sleek bodied, claw-footed, gappy-grinning, gruntish terrors followed my moves. From England's Gothic spires, sat like lions with wings spread, to Italy and thence to Romania.

Now they were even seen here, intoned in stone, like me. Waiting to beat down with their skeletal wings like reapers carrying the death-bound to hell.

With my scientific mind hungering but one step ahead of my noxious desire to feast from flesh, I wielded tomes instead of my teeth to humans. I hunted for myths and fairytales, history of my kind and others, instead of preying on the weaker, softer, easier-to-be-had race.

I'd had my share just as much as this rapacious sickness.

I begged the doctors and nurses--those who were far too young to die, those who had families waiting at home--to leave me to this work.

Of humility and pride and ethic, they all declined, stating it was below my station to clean out slop pans, or I would be incapable of seeing to everyone.

Little did they know.

As the nights wore on, I became more and more restless while my colleagues became infinitely more exhausted by the strain. Letting them doze where they were sitting and oftentimes even standing, I gave pace to my speed to clean, coddle, swab, swaddle, and comfort.

I smiled pleasantly as my comrades awoke to the pristine state of the ward, congratulating each other on making it through one more night that had been filled with death and groaning and vomit and diarrhea unbeknownst to them.

It was the least I could do while they continued to negligently endanger themselves.

The makeshift beds – I couldn't imagine those creaking, rusty, iron bedsteads to be comfortable to the hale and healthy, let alone the infirm – spilled their contents, lifeless corpses, to the morgue whose employees worked overtime to process and dis-house the bodies that had melted like from the sickening workings of Typhoid Mary.

The cost of this ruinous, riotous revilement was too high.

Pretending an air of calm I really didn't feel, I inspected charts, took temperatures, and listened to final confessions as if I were a man of the cloth as my shoes clicked over the tiles that needed mopping of discharge once again.

This was my just due, to surround myself in blood, the very thing that sustained me, while continuing to deny it. My own, personal, horsehair vest, like scratchy wool upon my skin; splintery parchment scraping my throat.

Sometimes I wanted to touch it with my mouth as it flowed from cuts, wounds, and open sores. My lips pursed, my tongue longed to reach out, the empty grotto of my chest clenched in ache. Overriding it all was the pure tyranny I had witnessed, some of it at my own hands. Just once, just at the beginning of this eternal life.

Although not quite born into the Middle Ages, the fear of the preternatural still abounded. The supernatural had surrounded us, sunk into shadows to leap out in nightmares and tales of comeuppance by creatures warding off less warranted empirica. They weren't parables, these stories. They were factual recounting. Reformation, Humanism, and Renaissance were all to follow, but while I was a boy, I lived in the mongering fear of things that went bump in the night; fantastical fiends who would not be explained away with the rising of the sun.

Father lathed a trail against the cesspool of less than sage intent; doctors who let leeches harvest blood from patients, new mothers who tied rabbits feet, still red and fetid around the shards of white uncovered bone, to their bairn's ankles, pregnant women who turned to herbal medicinal to ensure the health of their unborn. Even learned, astute, vigilant, his practice as a man of cloth worried to the mockery of myth inside his god-blessed soul.

And while he stood at his moth-nibbled pulpit with votives lit and the least of all pomp and circumstance, lecturing against demons, he still believed.

And he made me a vigilante.

Doing my father's bidding, a strict Anglican vicar whose goal was to persecute and destroy all who worked against his heavenly deity, I pursued those we assumed to be witches – _though now I wondered at their true nature_ – and vampires, whose ashen rust was to run coagulated in my veins.

I followed a snickering troupe of feisty fellows to a bunker below a ramshackle, abandoned farm. The opulence in the dolmen gave lie to the distressed structure above. Lamps pushed strobes of orange over heaps of affluent throws, jeweled tapestries hung over bare bricks, bric-a-brac in the form of spectral gems and piles of goblets and coinage were scattered about. Furniture was arranged haphazardly, with nary a care to placement.

A den of thieves and iniquity and destruction.

Loping softly down the stony stairs, I prayed not to God or Mary or Jesus. And perhaps that was the trespass that staked my heart with dragon's teeth. No, I called upon the deities of my Hellenic studies, that tutelage I hid from Father… of Zeus and Hera, their pure daughter Hebe whose evergreen scent I captured in my nose against this grievous griffon's lair. To Athena, my warrior queen, and Aphrodite for love. Apollo, to fly me out of this cave even while my feet led me further down to the sunken mine of treasures.

Before I reached the bottom step, they were upon me. A gang of five with richness on their bodies, stealing the warmth of my own. In anguish, under the huge gashes and ghastly gnashes they tore from my body, understanding the cruel gore of teeth sinking to and through, so easily puncturing, my throat, my torso, and exactly into my thighs, I shouted for the god of fire, Hephaestus, to end this affliction and give me new torches to burn away the evil savages supping heathenishly from me!

The pain of my skin ripping apart in shreds like frail cloth was but a drop compared to the blazing skewers of pestilence pounding through me, dripping toxin in its slow, meandering way; maliciously swallowing my punctured organs, but only after gnawing with a blunt razor at every surface inside my body.

For three days, I turned on the spit of the most indescribable misery one could ever imagine! The flames did not roast my skin; they sat themselves, in bold brutal flicks, inside my nerves. Running like curses inflamed with hatred and hotter than blue fire, snapping each synapse like a tendon tenderly, ruthlessly, torn apart, one measly thread at a time. And each strand was impossibly endless, so the agony went on ceaselessly.

Not just one ligature disbanded languorously, but all of them, everywhere, inside me, at once.

If I thought this was the end of my punishment, I was wrong. Because my heart, kidneys, stomach, liver, lungs… everything but my brain, were licked with tongues like cat-o-nine tails. For hours on end. Days, even, I think. Sharp, mace-like punctures chopped into me, and I felt I could hear the squelch of each artery succumbing to incineration.

In my first days, having eaten my tongue near-off to quiet my screams while flames burst from within the marrow of my bones, eating through layers of tissue, scorching my sight in vermilion, causing me to shake and needing to shriek, I did nothing but roll, silently, in agony.

Wakening, I burned yet more.

I had to find a reason for this hideous existence.

To turn a disability into a gift.

_I would not be a gruesome beast!_

I was one of those _gargouilles, gurgulio._ A water spitter, because the only liquid to soothe me was red, hearty, and beating. Not clear, tasteless, and untinctured.

A deep pull of air, which neither satisfied me nor filled the fixed location of my resolute lungs, brought a heady scent into my nose. It intoxicated me so much more than the wine of Jesus' body.

Hunkering low on my haunches, I slithered towards that smell.

It was a woman whose beauty was only defined by the vision of carnelian clapping just beneath the nothing of her skin.

Lips curling, throat curdling, growl hurtling, I pounced and drove the spikes of my teeth into her neck, first, and then her upheaved breasts and softened thighs beneath manifold taffeta skirts!

Satiated, disgusted, replete, and vile, I shoved her away with one hand to her boot-clad ankles and clasped her to me by her lax shoulders. Upon my knees, discovering though I smoldered with weeping, I could not call forth tears. I held this unnamed lass and sought to throw her aside all at the same time.

Thus was the dual nature of my being; forever at war.

She was the first I took. She was the last.

I was horrifyingly full up over the next several days. A stuffed-to-my-gullet feeling that sickened me. When, _finally_, hunger twisted my gut again, I breathed through my mouth, or did not breathe at all. Wandering the park near my father's church, a flash of white and brown and flesh cavorted beneath a copse of trees.

_Deer._

Opening my olfactory senses, inhaling deeply, I imbibed their musky odor and found it not lacking!

Days passed into months into years. I never aged, never salivated but for toxin I could feel coating my perfect teeth. I never urinated nor did I sleep.

I never came across the vampires who had sired me.

I approached this nauseating new breed of me the only way I knew; analytically, academically. In need of diversion, I took to medicine school. Ever the self-torturer, I thought it the best way to inure myself against human blood.

Shockingly, it worked. Surprisingly, I had an aptitude for physiognomy.

Though the ticking of time stood still for me, it moved its second hand forward for others. My father died. Having laid him to rest, I moved on.

In Italy I came across my first coven of vampires. Though more civilized than what I had known, attempting to govern their own, collecting art, keeping citizens alive – _if only to do their bidding _– they were still murderous. These Volturi and I had an agreement for a time. They would shelter me and encourage me in my studies, and I would turn a blind eye to their cruel killing of the populace.

Another century, certain friendships were made. But my dedication to the breathing ones was mocked, and I had rather been around _them_ than my own.

On my leave of Italy, I made way through Romania. To Vladimir and Stephan who'd been shunned by my Volturi vultures. There was no ill will between us. In happenstance, out of curiosity, I wandered the forests and market places on days wealthy with fog only. At the square situated midpoint in the town, their imposing castle reining over it, I came in contact with an exigent people who'd travelled the globe and set down their wares where money and occupancy was to be had, most thriftily.

The Romanis.

Their music was a kaleidoscope to my unbeating veins! They didn't look through me, as so many people did. But closed their cloaks about the necks and turned their back nonetheless.

As if they knew.

In a first class cabin, as befitting one of the chosen Volturi disciples, I forged to the New World where wars erupted through pioneering spirit and claim-staking of precious land.

Meeting up with men and women of my inglorious kind, I was always cordial, quiet, and bracing ahead. Not judging them their tastes for the blood I would not allow myself, I looked for my own consignment in this being that would be mine for a very long time.

I was trying to find acceptance in this territory that was yet to be settled. I could either be a creeping thing of lore or a part of society that walked about in the day-lit hours, made a living, got on with life.

Hubris was mine. I did not want to wear the brand of vilification.

My methodical, medicinal nature oriented me like the North Star. In sustaining me, my pragmatism enabled my eschewing of deeper turns to emotion; such things as love, happiness, companionship…they were not to be mine. I felt loss, surely, every day a hermit whose life was an unerring, glimmer-sanguine-littered path stretching into the unmapped cosmos. But I was painstakingly turned off from the needs of a soul I preferred to believe still existed in a place, perhaps, just this side of Heaven, with one toehold in Purgatory.

_~~ll~~_

My time in Chicago was coming to an end. Soon I would move on, take up residence elsewhere, work, make no friends, hold myself apart and hie away from embraces, touches, invitations.

As a last hurrah, I accompanied a very few colleagues from the upper echelons of St. Luke's to Swan Lake. Just hours before the fat treachery of influenza sank like an immoveable mist over Chicago from the ground up.

All was fine and frippery at this _fin_.

Yet there were falcon's eyes piercing my back through the entirety of the first act.

I wrapped my expensive, ivory, cashmere scarf closer to my neck and warded off the flirtatious infatuation of women who took mention, not so subtly, of my handsomeness. I charged off the feeling of someone rifling through my existence.

As intermission fell, I couldn't explain the direction of my feet in Italianate loafers taking me to the upper balcony.

Illogically, I found myself searching the loggia as most of the audience convened in the lobby for spirits and a break.

Interrupting a young man scanning the emptied seats below and on either side of him, I quickly excused myself while taking in his moss eyes and the emblem of his forethought so clear on his guarded visage, "Do please forgive me, young sir. I seem to have misplaced my party."

Barely swallowing his huff of annoyance, the almost-man looked me up and down with disdain tempered in wisdom. And again I heard the scurrying brush of fingers trying to slide into my mind.

He himself was half-hidden, a mystery, attempting entry to me whereas he'd blankly regarded the massed populace of opulent ballet-goers.

Stroking his chin, a human tic, narrowing his eyes to fathom yet more of me, he disdained to speak and nodded his ascent of my leaving.

The scent and strange insight of him held me bound in stocks nonetheless! Until a small chuckle left his lips and he focused behind me.

The curtain lifted.

One of his own stood framed in plush red.

His mother.

Also something completely--_other_.

I took the fabric from her hands and held it aloft for her entrance, further for my escape.

This might be the escapade that ended me!

Appearing nothing more than a beautiful matron, though young in features and lilt of lips and eyes and not quite earning that title, but for the ermine stole and sparkling jewels upon her fair breast and small ears, this society lady hooked me with the utterly incomprehensible penetration her son had.

Her perception caused me to case myself in twisted, viney nothings to propel her. It was a talent I'd grown into under Aro's simple, sickly, touch of knowledge.

She also smelled of a familiar. Like her offspring.

There was more to their acumen.

A gypsy? A witch? Did she suspect me a warlock? A vampyre?

Certainly, we all existed, and the lit jade in her eyes with her succinct perusal made me understand she was a wise woman, weathered and learned as much as me in the wild workings of the undertones of our imaginations.

_~~ll~~_

Not a day later, the illness made septic work of the city.

All thoughts of the young man and his mystifying mother left me.

Nearly immune to the fragrant scope of blood, not deigning to partake of the infusion both beautifully enchanting and pestilent in its putrefaction, I doctored wherever I was accepted.

A sharp, rattling, wet, thick cough broke my reverie and reminded me that I was not, in fact, alone this night.

A chair raked across the tiles somewhere down the room and a curtain was parted as another body was wheeled out.

Following the sound of sputum, I found a lady half-keeled over with the back of her skeletal hand pressed to her mouth in an attempt to keep the foaming expectorant within. Grabbing a tin kidney-shaped basin, I ran to her and wrenched her hand aside with all the gentleness I had learned, and enabled her to rid her mouth of the effluvia inside.

Lowering her back to the bed, I placed the bowl aside and out of vision.

The smell of antiseptic expunged any last odor of her vomit.

Her hands clasped to her chest, she grappled with the sheet and met my eyes obliquely. Her own were like the dales and glens of my fatherland.

She was so much different than the woman clothed luxuriously, in her element, trying to inscribe my past not so very long ago!

_His mother._

_Her._

_Elizabeth Anthony Masen._

She was dying. The woman from the ballet. Quickly, uneasily, I flitted to the fitting image of her son in his regalia, waiting to go to battle, for his turn to die patriotically for his country… _was he here too? Had a long, arduous demise stolen him already from his fiercely protective mother?_

Queerly, she was clear, for all the calamitous epidemic that made piecemeal of her organs.

I felt more frenzied than she appeared, at this distinct moment.

The tall clock tower of the bank that rested against our hospital took on its loud toll, denoting midnight.

In a crackling whisper, like wax paper, she said, "My husband is dead?"

_Yes, an Edward John Masen, a man of the City, had fallen. I'd seen to him myself._

Although I'd only thought it, she knew.

I nodded and held her fragile wilting hand in both of my own, cooling the spiking temperature of her body.

An unholy wail of hellcats pushed out her throat with more strength than I thought she was capable of!

A banshee, intense energy that of the bereaved, belted her against the bed until purple marks manifested into her fists and forearms and she ripped hanks of hair from her head, holding the rarely-colored locks out in offering, as if I could resurrect her mate from her strands. A pound of flesh.

All that came from her tumbled, feverish, spire lips was a mess of, "I love him! _I love him!_ Edward John, _Edward Anthony!_ _Doamne_ ,save me, _surrender me!_"

She was not one bit theatrical but held to soil in the treacherous turmoil of her loss twinned with the love and hope for her son.

I gathered her clawed fingers from musty sheets, held her upright and to me as she beat back and forth between life and death, husband and son.

Things I'd never understand.

The sounds emitting her mouth were nothing motherly! Barren, spitting, hissing, hating, hurting, in dementia she pounded me, but there was no hurt I could ever feel more than her in her loss.

Growls formed to gasps and shattered shaking. And she stilled. Her eyes watched a cot down the way; beneath a threadbare blanket a young man, a formerly handsome man laid.

_And I had to understand, she was one of the others who knew me._

Finally focused, in livered disease, cirrhosis, those orbs sharpened upon me. I could never have expected her next words, choked on bile as they were, "Please, I beg you, Doctor Cullen, save my son! He is my only child, he's not meant to die. Not now. _Not ever_."

We both turned our heads to the trundle of a laden gurney whose squeaky wheels made way down the hall that was dirty again.

She crossed herself and silver tears tapped into her harrowing mouth.

"I'll always be Eliza Anatolia, doctor. I am a seer, a gypsy, a Romani. But on my death certificate you will know me as Elizabeth Masen; a woman of high society and family, and above all else, the wife of Edward John Masen," she choked on those words and shuddered inside though her tears had dried up, "and the mother of Edward Anthony Masen. You, kind sir, _are my curse, fortune, and reprieve."_

Shaken and scared she had seen _me_ as I was not meant to appear, I brooked indifference, released her hand and settled back down onto the mattress that was not even dented beneath her wasted form.

I should have just sped out of this domicile of death and never looked back!

Instead I dropped my head to my hands and hated my next words, because _she knew_! Platitudes would not do here. Utterances never before spoken found the crux of my straightened lips as I all but barked out, "But is he ready for my kind of death?"

Catastrophic hope pounded me with her next weakening pronunciation, "Yes!"

I growled and cornered this Elizabeth Masen back onto her pallet, the hardened, coral isotopes of my eyes unjust, "How do you know this, Madame?"

I had no thought for my own safety. I would willingly give up my life, my punctured being at the drop of a coin; but for one to know these things was counter-intuitive. And to ask me to murder, maim, sire her only child was unmentionable. I all but gagged on the odd human reflex that pushed venom like choler up into my mouth. Not out of hunger, but out of hurt.

Showing not one sliver of self-preservation, Mrs. Masen didn't shrink beneath my rage; a thing I generally replaced with compassion.

Relenting, hiding my eyes, loosening my muscles, becoming the genteel physician again, in search of answers, I listened as her breathy beaten voice carried on so succulently, heating my need for blood and fraternal love, "I can see into your mind. I read your compassion. I hear your silenced words." The simplicity and purity of her smile smote me. "You should talk more often, out loud. Edward will need that."

Newly grasping her hand, a flighty pale thing that grappled with death's fast-approaching scythe borne by a black-winged carriage and the lashing of night-dark steeds, I was shaken.

She was less of this earth than I! _Eliza Anatolia!_

The gryphon of fatality unfolded his mighty midnight eagle's feathers and opened his gaping maw around the rattle of air spurting out her chest, filling her lungs with decay but not overshadowing her voice, "I was told, before Edward's birth, by a _ghicitoare_ -- _Mortality will be eclipsed for _his _love is a machination of the future. Whatever you believe, Eliza, you know in your heart, phantoms live and humanity reins._"

Skin and bones, kneeling at death's door, she entreated. Sallow, an invalid, leaking life force, all I saw of this woman, the might of her encapsulated in my precise eyes, was a mother. Impaired by the trappings of maternal instinct to keep her own alive even while she succumbed to the wasting disease. A glorious person. _A mother_. Paternal impulses were something I had never understood.

Her eyes were sovereigns tarnished.

In pleading.

Near to leaving.

But hanging on. For her young Edward.

_She was so sure._

The flicker of my pulse that was only a stopped watch of a thing increased in speed as Elizabeth Masen's slowed to a near halt. A doctor, a savior, I had never desired to sire another, to make one of my own kind. Solely alone for two hundred and fifty-five years, I had been solitary but capable.

And now I yearned for more than I'd ever thought possible.

Her pulse slipped to nearly nothing, a limp in her wrist beneath my clasp.

Still she advised, "Give this to my son." Death corroded over her and she bore against it. Slipping a many rayed-diamond ring from her fourth finger, she placed that metal, heavy with love and life and loss, inside my palm. Her wish was more firm and intoned resplendently in a Romanish legend my encyclopedic thoughts clung to, "_Taci, fiul meu, si i'll-ti dea tinerilor fara virsta si viata fara moarte. _Be quiet, my son, and I'll give you youth without age and life without death_._"

I held her wastrel body and hoped she'd find her husband in the hereafter.

Little sips of air quieted.

Abruptly she sat up; it was that final thrust of life pounding her strongly, her last pleas, "Remind him! Make him remember our people, our heritage. _Tell him!_ I was his mother, and his forbears are the Anatolians."

She slid down to the mattress, but mumbled again, "There's more. She'll save you. _She'll save you again."_

Acquiescing, I filled a glass syringe. I could stand her fight, her misery, her just-love, her beseeching no more. I would answer her call, if she would give me this in return, and allow me to ease her perpetual pain with the knowledge her son would continue with some semblance of life.

Disinfectant and decadent drops of morphine created a cloying mist as I surpassed the usual calming dose with words of solace and gratitude and a confidence I didn't quite feel any longer.

Wavering light filtering through an ampoule and dimming from ivy brilliance to deadened moss, Elizabeth's eyes extinguished with her final respirations. Her serene smile turning to rigor extended from beyond the grave.

The lights blinkered out again, for good. This dense darkness on a night so portentous was nothing more than appropriate. I reached for a candle, hearing the faint lapsed canticles sung in my father's parish church in days of yore. My only guide to the young man who was about to meet his maker was song, ages-old and Christian, and an orange-yellow flame that elongated and rippled in front of me. I perched on a hard chair at his bedside and affected a soothing tone as I stole a cool cloth across his sweaty brow, "Edward Anthony Masen, your mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Masen, wanted you to have this."

Even in feverish delirium, his eyes were bright and of forests, just like his mother's, when he turned them to me. The ague that racked his body was nothing compared to the simple, unholy paroxysm of grief that seized him. Agitation chilled over his form, a boy on the cusp of manhood. Would I bring his end? Could I save him for something more? _Was there more?_

I'd gathered Eliza thought him to be the heir to his people.

I imagined him to be the savior of my own.

I felt the loneliness of all my years spread its complaint over my legs, my arms, my trembling hands as I dropped his mother's wedding ring into his palm and folded his clammy fingers over this last possession.

Understanding and sympathy and desperation to belong to another, to replicate that thing which was every human being's right, _parenthood_, solidified me. I blessed myself, whispering, "_Forgive me Father, for I am about to sin."_

Though I did not want to read his fear that ran like spilled ink across the meadow of his eyes, I kept his sight as I leant down, showing him my teeth while I yet calmed his skin with my touch. Comprehension was faster than my eerie haste as it landed, a written edict, across his visage. A rarity in the one instance, perplexingly stunning to see twice in one family, Edward had his mother's gift to see within the thoughts of others.

His blood so hot and pure tasted of innocence and torment, fatigue and fight. Working more quickly to make him a vampire than I ever had to save a human life in surgery, I was relieved to take my leave of his innards. There was no struggle, no desire to linger and feast. Consumed, instantly enraptured with singular devotion, civility, fatherly emotion, the fates had handed me something irreplaceable!

A son!

Sudden realization illuminated me, taking over the vaporizing traces of Edward's taste. I knew that which I had always hoped to be true, that souls did live on after demise and passed from one being to another. The flash of his blood into my veins was replete with juicy promise of a future for Edward that was meant to be! Not now, not even soon, but eventually, _he was going to know love like no other_.

_Isabella Swan!_

There _was_ grander significance to this monster whose skin I inhabited!

Through my past, Elizabeth's death, and Edward's future, I was rebirthed.

* * *

~~Do you have chills? Please review, this story means as much to me, in a different manner, as Dead Confederates~~

Edward, next time.

Cheers, Rie~

I updated my oneshot (ahem, yeah) _Surrender_.

_Rebelward Without a Cause _and _DC_'s next. Okay?


	4. Crave

To my superfabulous, delicious, and talented beta duo, Viola Cornuta and vanessarae, cheers, babies!

Lots of lovely hugs and gropes to mah women of the DW!

The italicized passages below are from the folk story _Youth without Age and Life without Death_ and continue on from that tale told in Eliza's chapter. I did add a bit and changed a couple words here and there.

Oh yeah, don't know if you know this, but reading fics in 1/2 view (upper right of your screen) is so much nicer, you should try it!

**Disclaimer: **SM owns stuff.

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Three: Crave**

**Edward Anthony Masen**

"_Father, the time has come to give me what you promised me at birth."_

Hearing this, the emperor became very sad, and he said to him, "Son, where can I get such an unheard of thing as that to give you? And if I promised you then, it was only to quiet you down."

_  
"If you can not give it to me, Father, then I must need scour the whole world until I find the pledge for which I came into this life."_

_  
Then all the lords and the emperor threw themselves on their knees, with pleas that he not leave the kingdom. And the lords added, "Since your father is an old man from here on out, we shall raise you to the throne, and we shall also bring you the most beautiful empress under the sun for a wife."_

_  
But they couldn't turn Handsome Son from his resolution to discover that pledged token, unending youth without the kiss of death. He stuck to his word like a rock so that when his father saw that over and over again, he gave him his leave and planned vittles for the trip and all things needful._

I was seventeen years old, for goodness' sake! This should not seem such a task. An adolescent, really a man, ready to be conscripted and sent center stage into the perils of The Great War, I had yet to know a woman's caress. Nor even my own touch upon my manhood.

All I had was Romanian folklore told to me, that, like the Handsome Son, I could escape this claustrophobic knowingness by finding my feet on the soil of another continent, in the occupation of a soldier.

I was an insular young man, in as much as the only favored son of the great Chicago Masen dynasty could be. Headed by the undying, untiring poo-bah of our prominent family, my grandmother Louise Harriet, we Masens were veritable aristocracy.

Growing up as both Protestant and Orthodox Christian, I followed the customs of my mother and my father.

As if brought to us by a corporeal wind skating across Lake Michigan, my mother's people, the Anatolias, would caravan through our midst with their mystique and ribaldry, their numbers ever growing as ours remained static. They brought with them guidance and acceptance for my gifts; surrounding the staid parlor of our brownstone with garrulous laughter, rollicking lăutari music in high rapid notes, and delectable food my mother only cooked on Saturday afternoons.

Between their twice-yearly jaunts of festivity and legend and my day-to-day life as Edward Esquire, I was flanked by two worlds that found me, more often than not, inhabiting the corridors of my mind. Every third summer I was encouraged to travel with the troupe. I was fifteen the last time I'd made the sojourn from fairground to carnival around the Midwestern territories. Attempting to cajole me take up the fortune telling trade of a _ghicitoare_ as my mum had done in her youth, my strămătușă Petronela pouted a bit when I declined, uncomfortable as ever with delving too far into the subconscious of innocents and guilty alike. Instead, I contented myself with the music, playing bothţambal, a hammered dulcimer-like instrument, and even the cimpoi, my Romanian bagpipe, to time the Oro dance circling around us musicians.

I also wandered through the litter and garish hues, tuning out the fracas and melee.

There was a feud between a family of Black Dutch, Germanic gypsies, the Higgins, whom we met often on our forays to exhibitions far and wide. Not caring about the dispute that seemed tangled up in familial politics and territorial vendettas, their middle daughter Lieselotte and I befriended one another. A flaxen-haired girl my age, she was bright of spirit amidst a people of more swarthy skin. She knew no subterfuge, and to peek inside her mind was to see exactly what she wore on her visage. Truth and innocent beauty; angelic in her personality. Capering and a little bit of a pickpocket too!

That time, that summer, was when my libidinous thoughts, my traitorous pubescent body, became dire with a man's call to flesh. Not for Lotte though; she was but a friend, almost my sister.

That hot season was to be the last of my outings with my Romani relatives.

_~~ll~~_

Desiring to be less straight-laced, indecently overpowered time and again by the scandalous thoughts of women, both young and old, educated and monied, impoverished and lowly, who galloped so devilishly through my head at a steady clip-clop pace with every passing glance, the idea of _masturbating_ left a foul, unacceptable taste in my mouth.

But my body had a mind of its own! Virginal, having never so much as chastely kissed a girl, I was horrified as my penis ached and grew and solidified, tenfold times a day.

I began to think I wasn't normal.

In fact, I _knew_ I was not typical. Aside from my father and parts of my upbringing, everything about me was unconventional. My mother, though proper, was flamboyant, a vision, visionary. Née Eliza Anis Anatolia, a gypsy from a long line of soothsayers, she met my uppercrust Chicagoan father at a fair. Her family's wagons circled the grounds just as she moseyed through the crowds selling bouquets of wildflowers and tempting fortunes. My father, whose Christian name I shared, was taken instantly as her touch upon his palm told of their future together. That first instance, they were too young. Time, place, _prophecy_brought them together one more time, fashioning a grand love that rebounded against societal strictures. They wouldn't be outdone, never to be outshone. The steadfastness, the luxuriousness of their feeling laid waste to the Masen family claims that Eliza was from disreputable stock. Their disapproval gave way to relenting acceptance. A man not to be thwarted, Edward John laid his claim, fast and true, and they were married within the year of 1900.

I wanted that!

A newlywed at twenty-two, Edward John came into ownership of Masen Furriers when his own father died. Eliza was always stoled in capes of mink and the finest wrappings, replacing the gauzy, brilliantly-hued shawls she had been handed-down before. At first disapproving of a less than fortuitous love match, his family came to regard lately-christened Elizabeth as one of their own. Over time, she did not so much change as afford others the opportunity to adapt to her. With humor and welcoming arms, hospitality that knew no match, a generous heart that made her a deft hand at all the city's philanthropic projects, she grew to a respected society lady, invested in the innards of Chicago. Sitting on the boards of its museums, hospitals, and orphanages, she held all in thrall with her sparkling, free spirit and exotic wit.

Prodigious on the piano as well as the indigenous instruments of my eastern European ancestors, tuned to the inner workings of near everyone, I came across as detached from most… the opposite of my mother. Only through my innate athleticism, my prowess at lacrosse and fencing, did I form a few lasting friendships with boys who were far more experienced and worldly than I. Beguiled by their stories of flirtation and courting, I listened to their spoken words as well as looked into their minds' they told tall tales that didn't fold true with the erotic dealings they described.

Remaining an outsider, set apart, I was often ill at ease in my own body.

One refuge I knew was my mum. Never once smothering me, giving me space and time and encouragement, she was more a companion than anything else. In need of simple distraction, we often sat in the plaza of Lincoln Parkwhile the brisk weather whipped up a gale from our Great Lake. I looked low, to the feet in heeled leather boots, brogues, the sweep of skirts newly revealing delicately-boned ankles, the hooves of horses, the wheels of conveyances. Passing me by. People watching. Innocuously sharing insights. In those moments only was my aptitude, met by that of my mum, a thing of jollity.

Father knew. He never disproved, but this fine wire of a thing that allowed give and take of notion put him ill-at-ease. Discomfited him.

Shaking her head fiercely, Mother reached across the bench and held my hand. She wanted me to find love, but not like this. Not because my appearance was a beacon to lewd, cheap thoughts. So much like hers, my hair flashed a new copper penny flicked from thumb and middle finger into the fountain centerpiece of the square. The Rainier of my green eyes flecked out beneath long black lashes as I tried to ignore, and catch sight of, the women whose thoughts feasted on my form. Always pale, even otherworldly, I never fit in with the neighborhood boys who were kissed by the sun's rays. _Tall, fit, good looking, chiseled, odd, _those were all descriptions I heard, silently, of myself. Oftentimes it was too much!

Aside from outings with my mates Whit, and Carty, I hermited myself away.

I was my mother's son through and through, except I lived inside; she cascaded gloriousness over everyone she met.

_~~ll~~_

_Then Handsome Son went to pick a horse from the royal stables where the most beautiful stallions in the whole kingdom were to be found, but no sooner did he put out his hand and yank one by the tail, than he threw it down, and all the other horses collapsed in the same way. Finally, at just the moment when Handsome Son was ready to leave, he cast his eyes once again around the stable, and catching sight of a scrawny, distempered, scabby horse in a corner, he went over to him as well, but when he put his hand on that horse's tail, the horse turned his head toward Handsome Son and said, "Master, what do you command? Thank the Lord for helping me reach a time when a brave young man puts his hand on me again." And stiffening his legs, he stood straight as a candle. _

_Then Handsome Son told him what he intended to do, and the horse replied, "To achieve your heart's desire, you must ask your father for the saber, lance, bow, quiver and arrows, as well as the clothes he himself wore when he was a lad; while as for me, you will have to take care of me yourself with your own hand for six weeks, and all that time you must give me barley boiled in milk."_

_  
So Handsome Son set about asking the emperor for the things the horse advised. The emperor called on the court bailiff and ordered him to unlock all the coffers that held garments so that his son might choose the ones he liked. After rummaging for three days and three nights, Handsome Son finally found--in the bottom of one old trunk-- the arms and garments that had belonged to his father when he was a lad, but the things were very rusty. Handsome Son took it on himself to cleanse the weapons of rust with his own hands, and after six weeks he succeeded in making the arms shine like a mirror. At the same time he also took care of the horse as the horse had told him to do. He had enough work to do, but, howbeit, he succeeded. _

_When the horse heard from Handsome Son that the garments and arms were well cleaned and ready, he shook himself, and the boils and glanders fell off him all at once, and he stood there just as his mama made him: a strong, full-bodied horse with four wings. Seeing him thus, Handsome Son said, "We leave three days from today."_

_  
"Long life, master. At your service. I'm even ready today," replied the horse._

Portentously frightened of my death, Elizabeth abhorred my enlistment. Even as she prepared my uniforms and kit, she hungered over me in supplication. "Edward, I understand that you need to go out on your own. _Please_ reconsider this! University awaits you. You may go as far away to school as you like, just… _don't do this,_" she pleaded. With a flash she was unable to withhold, I saw her looking back to the first time I'd shaved, how she'd paced the hall and then proudly, tearfully, taken in my scraped clean jaw, cheeks, and upper lip with the thought I hadn't heard at the time, _You're _

_becoming a man._

I collected my service gear and began to pack my steamer trunk and duffel bag, wondering what was to come. The only weapon I'd held before was a slim stock Winchester while hunting with Father and his colleagues. I hated enough the idea of killing game, and now I'd be expected to murder people.

_For God and Country._

Even when I doubted myself, minutely, my fortitude remained undimmed. Eventually both Edward John and Elizabeth supported my decision.

Either way, I was going from them.

Seeking to leave her heartache behind before time, I caroused with Whit and the lads. Clacked glasses and watched, from afar, as they paired up with women who were too facile for my taste.

It wasn't as if my body didn't answer to the call of beautiful women surrounding me. But there was such a thing as proper. _And this was anything but._

Above all? I longed for silence from such rapacious thoughts.

I fancied there was something more for me. That beyond the sprawling terraced lawn in the Gold Coast district, the woman who would be my timeless love was awaiting my erstwhile appearance, just as I was anticipating her presence.

Perhaps I would find _it_, discover myself, decode my imaginings overseas. Stumble upon _her; _the woman who invaded my sleep and caused my restless tendencies.

With just under a month until my call-up date, I craved to be less tight-laced, less stiff. My friends, future servicemen, taunted me, laughing I would go off to war a virgin, and probably die one too.

I wanted the first time I made love to be with my wife.

Remaining like a hulking great chunk of granite from the quarry, the very idea of touching myself for pleasure and release was rather shocking. This was not something to query Father over. I blushed and shook my head at the thought. _That _would not do. Kind, a worthy humanitarian, gallant, dashing, and foreboding at times, Edward John was a sharp, astute, intelligent, and fervent man. Nevertheless, certain lines were not to be overstepped, and these things weren't spoken of.

Blessed, or cursed, with my mother's rhododendron locks, her ivy eyes, and bits of her traits and quirks, I gained my proud bearing, my tall stature, my lean muscled physique and carved features from my father. My sometimes confidence, my lapsed carefree attitude were hers, my oftentimes aloof-yet-concerned nature his.

With a fortnight left before being shipped overseas, I begged off from my fellow revelers.

At home, the evening invariably ended with us three in the parlor.

A long, bejeweled, platinum cigarette holder embraced the slim Lucky Strike Elizabeth gently tugged with her fashionably carmine Helena Rubenstein painted lips, tapping her ash to a crystal capsule that was emptied after each spent butt. Father swished his Remy-Martin and puffed his Reyes Family Corona**.**

Sitting side-by-side on the close cushions of the chaise, their touches were unconsciously adoring, desiring; unconscionably disquieting and inspiring.

Rich tobacco formed faint, blue clouds. The fragile scent of fresh green leaf always clung to my mother's clothes; the scent of home, fields and pastures, like her eyes.

After finishing a nightcap to talk of cheers, thanks and determined gaiety, my parents waltzed beautifully around the cleared space while I played on the piano.

I bit my lip, knew my forehead was scrunched in frown and worry.

The masterpiece I worked upon was filled with longing, love, untold hope.

"What has you so tongue-tied this night, Edward dear?" _If only she knew! _Thankfully, Mum had learned early on to disregard my inner workings except when I invited her in. I bit down hard on my lip that was chapped, chafing it with my tongue, not deigning to speak.

Flushed and flustered and feeling something enormous coming hither, I settled to the cushions of the bench further. It did not help that out of nowhere, an erection grew beneath the pocket of my trousers. I shifted my legs further under the piano casing, pulled the bench up closer, closed my eyes and once more saw the young woman who preternaturally preoccupied me. Whose face, just moments before, had burst behind my eyes and caused the crush of engorgement to my groin! Beginning to tenderize the keys in earnest, I closed my eyes and was swept away again by Chopin's _Nocturne_.

My parents stopped dancing and sat side by side on the sofa, entwined. While I sat alone.

When I finished, my eyes not at all clear, Eliza exclaimed, "Beautiful boy, that was all of you. Edward, you should play more!"

"Son, you do have a gift, we must hold a recital before you go."

Ruffling my hair into a disheveled mess which I hastily rearranged into some semblance of order, Father bid me goodnight. Softer, more tender, Mother kissed my cheek lightly, hugged me tightly, sighing a wish that was both a lullaby and a question: _Where is your love, Edward?_

Leaving their refracting precious glasses holding drops of amber alcohol at the base to repeat rings upon the banquette behind the sofa, Edward and Eliza's whispers strolled up the polished staircase.

And our house was just small enough that I often heard what went on behind their bedroom doors… _quiet catechisms of Edward John and Eliza Anis in their reverberating passion like hymns sung in a cathedral, reverence, worship, plaisance. _My saving grace was my music, which I threw myself into, and my aptitude at culling unwanted pictures from my head.

I slept little. Either by hindsight or foresight, my dreams were haunted by _trompe l'oeil_ that looked so very real! None of it making sense, an illusion of a time and place that was unrecognizable to me; green, lush, damp, and people I had never seen. As my enlistment neared, one apparition stood out from the others. She came to me alone, and it no longer felt like I was in reverie.

Becoming a frequent visitor to my bedchamber, she caused me to look forward to the long nights that had previously taunted me with insomnia. Of long, soft, brown tresses and slim body, this hallucination tended to stroll about my room while I observed her through narrowed eyes. Fingering my belongings, riffling through my jumble of books, taking up my watch fob and inspecting its mechanism curiously, all the while seeming as if she were seeking to discover a clue to something.

After several nights in this manner, she cast her first look at me with a long smile and eyes of deep, creamy umber. When she walked towards me, lounging beneath the coverlet, I opened the blankets and welcomed her in. Curling against me, scratching my skin with her skirts and stiff blouse, her body was so much warmer than my own. I drifted off to slumber humming a simple tune.

Never did she speak. Never was I able to discern a single thread of her thoughts.

As a parting gift, my mother took me to Swan Lake at The Majestic. Throughout the first half of the performance, seated in our family's private box, I felt someone _other_ scrutinizing me. Taking up the opera glasses I scanned the gathered masses, looking for the mystery woman who was probably no more than a ghost, but who felt so empirically real.

_Nothing._

The bell chimed for intermission, and I was bombarded by Elizabeth and a gaggle of feminine frippery, introduced to a surplus of jubilant, clever, striking debutantes who pranced in the more revealing fashions of the time, and even then I found them all lacking. I breathed a sigh of relief when they made their leave with Mother in tow.

Voices broke like a burbling brook in my head, tossing up waves and disambiguating the phantom I imagined to be in the audience below.

Another presence parted the curtains, and I felt pale eyes piercing my back as I quelled the urge to huff in annoyance. The voice that found air was decidedly masculine, "Do please forgive me, young sir, I seem to have misplaced my party."

Rising from my seat, I swiveled and was keenly off balance as I recognized a man from my deceptive night fantasies! Not only were his eyes the color of a burning yellow wick in an oil lamp, but his hair was platinum and his skin alabaster. He could not have been much older than me, but he was elegant, assured, and in my dreams he was most definitely a father figure. Clasping the hand he held aloft in apology, I noted his skin was compact and cool. His mind was painfully obliterated and blank, but for a taste of surprise.

Interrupted by Mum before I could find the key to unlock his fractious figments, the man who was less-than-tied to this earth left our little opulent den.

Not before I understood with sickening clarity that he was a warlock, like the Scorpion Witch, just masculine in form. Dreadful and dastardly of former deeds, but a savior. The sweet scent of myrrh and frankincense, as befitted a saint, delimited him and wafted over us in his leonine, far too rapid, retreat.

Finding Elizabeth's eyes, shrewd as mine,I nodded to her in complicity.

Vapidity curtained again as Tanya and the others framed us.

The entire night distempered me.

_~~ll~~_

_On the morning of the third day, the whole court and, indeed, the whole realm were all full of woe. Handsome Son, dressed as a brave warrior with saber in hand, mounted on the horse of his choosing, said his good-byes to the emperor, to the empress, and all the greater and lesser nobles, the soldiers and all the servants of the court who, with tears in their eyes, begged him not to make this journey so as not to somehow lose his life, but Handsome Son giving spur to his horse, went out through the gate like the wind, and after the prince came carts with vittles, with money and some two hundred soldiers, whom the emperor ordered to accompany his boy. _

_  
Now, when Handsome Son passed out of his father's kingdom and reached the wilderness, he divided all the wealth among the soldiers, and keeping for himself only as much food as the horse could carry, he bid the soldiers farewell and sent them back. Then catching the road that heads toward sunrise, he rode, and he rode, and he rode for three days and three nights until he reached a vast field covered with a multitude of human bones. _

_  
When they stopped to rest, the horse said to Handsome Son, "You must know, my lord, that we are here on the estate of a fearsome Woodpecker who is so evil that no one sets foot on her estate without being slaughtered. She was once a woman like other women, but she wouldn't listen to her parents. In the end, she made them so terribly angry that their curse turned her into a Woodpecker. The Woodpecker is with her children now, but in the forest tomorrow we will meet her as she comes to destroy you. She is terrifically big, but don't you despair. Only have your bow ready so you can shoot her with your arrows, and keep your saber and spear close at hand to serve you at need."_

_  
That night Handsome Son and the winged horse gave themselves to rest, but when one watched, the other slept. _

_  
The next day, when dawn poured forth, they got ready to pass through the forest. Handsome Son saddled and bridled the horse. He secured the girth tighter than before, and he set out. All of a sudden he heard a frightful knocking as if someone pecked the air with a hammer blow. Then the horse said to Handsome Son, "Hold tight and get ready, master, because the Woodpecker in coming closer."_

_  
And when she came, oh brother, she bowled over trees, that's how fast she came, while the winged horse climbed like the wind until he was a bit above her. Then Handsome Son took her leg with an arrow, and when he was ready to strike her with a second arrow, she cried, "Stay your arrows, Handsome Son, that I do nothing to you!" _

_Seeing that he didn't believe her, she gave it to him written in her own blood. And on top of that she said, "Handsome Son, you wish that horse long life, wonder worker as he is. If it weren't for him, I'd have eaten you roasted. Now, however, it is you who have eaten me. Know that until today not one mortal dared to step over my boundaries. The few madmen who tried it only got so far as the field where you saw that heap of bones."_

Woefully, I longed for silence, succor. To be gone from the familiar, to find my own way.

But first I had to conquer my own body.

I chose my moment wisely. The afternoon following the ballet, my mother was volunteering at the hospital, tending to the invalids overcrowding wards as influenza continued to multiply its menace in our city. My father was, of course, at the office.

I closed my door and turned the skeleton key to the right with a satisfying click. Stepping up to my dresser, I let go the thoughts of women that sullied my mind and concentrated solely on my flesh, and the fabricated femme who came to me.

Yearning was most certainly mine.

I dropped my silver moneyclip to the polished wood with a metallic clatter. Taking up my brush, I groomed my hair and smoothed it down to an autumnal flourish over the crown of my head, parted just so. Smiled at my daftness as I was hardly preparing to go courting, I was simply getting ready to take matters into my own hands. Checking my reflection, I was contented with my cheeks, chin and throat that were still nearly smooth from the midmorning shave I'd received at the barber's. Sharply white against my ruddy chapped lips that had been described as thoroughly kissable in many a woman's thoughts, my teeth were straight, bright, and clean.

I flicked open my fitted vest, released my crisp, white shirt one button at a time, paying special attention to the heirloom cufflinks that held the fabric closed at my wrists, and laid those items atop my bureau. Running my hands through my hair, down my neck, my palms flattened over my hard chest and down to my stomach that flinched at first contact, twitched as I stole my hands further over the muscles and fine trail of fiery hair that ran from beneath my navel to my waistband and below.

Unclasping and unlooping my slim belt, I made for the fastening of my trousers. With buttons freed from their eyes, I spread the fabric wide, planted my hands inside, and leant over to shuffle the light gabardine down my thickly-muscled thighs and lean, carved calves. Under my feet and off my body.

Clothed only in my drawers, the shape of my penis hardened, lengthening within the confining yoke held closed by rows of buttons on either side.

I had a bitemark on my shoulder caused by an unfortunate meeting of teeth and clavicle during a rugby scrum. Rubbing that scar brought an odd frisson of excitement to me.

Hesitantly, I stroked my shaft through the cotton. A small irrepressible moan tore out of me! It felt so much like relief! Pulling the placket open, I wrapped my fist around my cock and helped it through the gap, stealing a glance in the mirror to watch in fascination the purpling, taut, velvet, vein-filled flesh that would fill more than two of my large hands as it grew to full height.

My head rolled back when I touched just my index finger into the dip that nestled wetly in the center of my hooded penis. Another gut-deep groan ached out of me.

Buttercream drops lifted out of my shaft.

I pulled my undergarments down my legs, gasped outright when the hot, blossoming head of my flesh furrowed against my abdomen.

Stepping back from the mirror, I licked my lips, licked my palms, took my cock firmly in both hands and settled down upon the crackling leather divan placed beneath the dormer window of my room.

Giving myself over easily to the idea of the lovely young lady who stole into my room of a night, who gave me solace and caused me to want, I closed my eyes and gnashed my teeth against further utterances. Pulling up with force, my hips arched up, my buttocks clenched, and I dove one hand onto my sac. My head beat to the side and my breath chopped and my voice belted, "Mother of God!"

I needed this. I desired her. This ethereal lass. Her company. Her body.

This enchantress, this singer, a forest witch, a princess held in the turret of my mind, she was a portent, and I felt her to be so very real.

As if I'd conjured her, she was suddenly here.

Drifting into my room, she smelled floral and fruity and sweet. A simple, highwaisted, calf length skirt trimmed in fur revealed her slight ankles whose turns of fragile bone made my mouth water. Her clothing was subdued as befitted this time of war. A ruffled blouse held tightly closed with mother of pearl stamps, a braided leather belt, and tiny pewter and diamond studs decorated her small ears, completing her outfit.

I hadn't heard her. Laid out, fully naked, caressing myself with my hands, I was like a Renaissance sculpture, Nude at Work. Translucent of step, opaque of mind, she was seated upon the arm of the chaise when I opened my chartreuse eyes.

A chanteuse, her voice was crystalline and innocent the first time I heard it through my shamed shock at her presence. Her words were anything but guileless, and still I could not fathom her inner thoughts. Making to grab the throw to pull over myself, she interrupted me with words and a hot touch to my wide wrist, "Please don't cease on my account, Edward."

Supple words and gestures that were all gamine. And highly indecent. Inappropriate!

I gulped down draughts of air, and all I smelled was her.

Perching at my bare feet, bawdily she asked, "May I touch you first, before you carry on?"

At her query, a fresh onslaught of desire ramped through me and a new flood of liquid shook my cock in its vertical column.

Seeing my body's reaction, she laughed brazenly, "I'll take that as a yes."

Her talk was singularly peculiar, from her words to her intonation. The verbiage that came out of her was equally innocuous and invasive, casual and somewhat crude to my ears. I felt tawdry, dirty, above all exquisitely aroused!

Throwing aside oppressive conscripts, I curtly nodded my head and ceased looking at her for fear of what was to come.

My forearm crooked over my face. I felt her moving to stand beside me. Held my breath, shifted my hips, sought her touch. A quick hiss and, _"Mama lui Dumnezeu!"_ ground out of me; scorching fingers slid from my toes that curled, to my lambent Achilles heels, over ankles and my quaking calves.

My body and mind were halved by the sundering pull of 'yes' and 'no'.

At the tender backside of my knees her fingertips delighted and I bit down hard on my bottom lip, knowing my face was caving in with stirring excitement, a fury of passion!

"Oh God," I punished out when that softest feather-touch skimmed my inner thighs, rubbed circles in the hair whorled there, and dangled under the firming fermenting pillows my cock sat upon. Melting into the slim line which separated the two sacs, her index finger became roguish, deftly fondling first one and then the other. Cupping both balls neatly in her entire hand, she then used all four fingers to run up my shaft, and her thumb to push into the damp slit on top.

Flushed with a skein of blood surging, I felt my cheeks reddening, my hips turning into her lascivious touch, and her own exhalations grew to a flighty thing with her ministrations.

"What? Why? Who…Oh LORD…who, who are you?" through great quails of breath I questioned her actions and intent.

"Does it feel good? Are you pleasured, Edward?" She returned hotly.

Nodding my head madly, I acquiesced.

"Then that's all you need to know." Strictly denying me any respite.

I unhooked my arm to watch her. She had loosened the first buttons of her shirtwaist, opening it to the chemise beneath and the hills of her bosom were scallop pink with want. Raising my hand, I pressed it right to those downy swells, tracing the line between and folding up into a bowl around the underside, plucking and pressing her hidden nipples with my thumbs.

Her eyes were now half mast as mine. And even darker.

Falling forward into my touch, she braced herself on my chest. I shifted again so her other hand sifted yet more perfectly around my shaft. Taking my penis betwixt index and middle finger, the back of her hand sank to my sac and her knuckles dug deep. Seized in her grasp, unwilling to look away from her eager, sensual surveillance of my filled-to-bursting organ, I was pulled and pushed and jerked and just this side of Heaven. Just this far gone to Hell.

Once I was whipped up to a frenzy, she inexplicably sat back and encouraged me to carry on.

But I was too wound up, this was perfectly right.

I sat up straight and brought her right down over me. The terrapin head of my penis directed against her slick wetness that was still demurely covered. I jutted up against her, licked my way up her neck to her lips and kissed her deeply with my mouth, my tongue reaching every erogenous crevice.

Deliriously this spirit woman swiveled against me and entreated, "Please. Please!" Bold and forward and impudent.

Her throat arched, denuded of the frothy ruffles at her collar bone, it called forth an exotic hunger for flesh and blood that was no less erotic.

With swiftness that was not mine, I turned her over, bent her under me, "Like this?"

"Yes!"

Power, ease, instinct beat within me. All the layers of righteousness I had never imagined before swam about me.

Primal and corporeal, primitive and insubstantial.

Still fully dressed, she shimmied her layers of skirting up, higher and higher. I aided her. Lace and ruching and underdress crumpled up in my fists at her hips so mountains of dark blue taffeta hilled at her waist. The ermine edging tickled my fingers with its sensual texture.

Making short work of her blouson, I parted it and shredded her chemise without compunction.

Mesmerized by the motion of her breasts swaying up and down, her cherry nipples were the only fixed point that grounded me, and my mouth.

Wavelets, from undercurrents. On my knees between her thighs, my erection cowled over her delta. Over and over and over again. The swivel of my hips met the upward reach of her pelvis. With her back lifted up like a rainbow from the sofa, I crouched above her and met every surface of her reclined body. Waves cresting, reaching lakeshore, breaking upon the sandbar situated at the juncture of her thighs. Each thrust was of nature, natural, up over her, down under her, rubbing and stroking. Her breasts collided with my lips as I ascended her almost bare body, my chest scraped her nipples as I settled back down into the riptide.

A gigantic crash gave freedom to my excitation, my shaft that had grown and tightened and turned so very dark with blood, and to my exclamation, "ISABELLA!" Her name came from deep inside.

"Swan," I gasped.

Alone.

She'd disappeared back into the ether from whence she'd come.

Only the wet, lavish plumes of milky seed, long streams of it upon the leather beneath me and all over my stomach and chest remained of our dimensional entanglement.

Sweaty, rumpled, satiated, still heated and newly ill-tempered, I cleaned myself up and fell to bed early.

I did not wake until late the next day.

All was strangely quiet. There was no bustle. No one had called me to breakfast. Even the street outside my casement was still.

Hot all over, queasy and thirsty, I looked longingly at my discarded habille, at the chaise that had been imprinted by one I would never know.

One foot in front of the other, I made my way down the stairs. Ponderously. Sensing something immense, impending.

I was shaking by the time I reached the foyer.

Cloying with grippe.

Elizabeth was a heap of bones and skin and lace and satin upon the plush rug of the parlor. Her breath wound in and out like a hurdy gurdy; the cranked and rosined wheels of her stringed-out neck uncontrolled by the simplicity of air.

Father vibrated out great chunks of breath, half undressed for bed in his drawers, shirtless, shoes still on, taken ill within the confines of the armchair that sat next to the marble fireplace.

_Influenza._

I scrambled to Mother and checked her shuddering pulse; crawled to Father and heard the rattle of death in his lungs.

Falling out of the house, down the steps, I met unconsciousness.

_~~ll~~_

_They ended by going to Woodpecker's home, where Woodpecker entertained Handsome Son most hospitably with all the honor due a traveler. But while they were at table regaling themselves with food and drink, Woodpecker groaned anew with pain. All of a sudden, Handsome Son fetched out the leg, which he kept in his pouch. He put it in place, and it healed itself forthwith._

_Out of happiness, Woodpecker stretched out the feast three days in a row, and she begged Handsome Son to choose one of her three daughters, beautiful as fairies. Handsome Son didn't want that, however, and he told the Woodpecker plainly what he was looking for. Then, Woodpecker said, "With your horse and your bravery, I believe you'll succeed."_

Waking to a cold touch, a flinty hard jewel with sharp edges cutting into my palm, I opened my bleary, grainy eyes.

_It was him!_

The man from the Ballet, the father from my dreams.

_A doctor?_ I blinked as I took in his white coat, his gleaming stethoscope, his glinting teeth. The sparkling diamond ring that had been pushed into my hand, cutting me with its shards.

My mother's ring?

Clarity was heaped over by chills.

"Edward Anthony Masen, your mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Masen, wanted you to have this."

My mother? My father? My touchstones?

_Dead?_

A vortex of noise, the rush of blood to my ears filled the yawning void bled by my deceased mother and father. Drowning out this Dr. Cullen's explanation of the last few days. Of the complete destruction of my family.

I caved in. Buckled beneath illness and grief. Tears made a craven mess of my face that was flushed through fever, not desire.

His sad smile grew wider. Telling me something. Hands a refuge of cold against the blazing, feverish swamp that entided me, he pressed my head aside.

The littlest glimpse of insight made me recognize his intent.

To murder me and raise me. I would enter that fairytale castle, my body a bastion not to be undone, my soul imprisoned in that everlasting encasement.

This doctor, vampire… _redeemer?_ …with laurel atop his butterscotch crown, had been given leave, from my mother, to impart youth without age and life without death.

_A sire._ A different oracle**.**

"_Your mother wanted this, Edward." _The precise puncture of his teeth to my throat found me crying inside!

A thought, my mother's voice, crawled over me, into me, blinding me of the sight and barbaric sounds of my own demise. _Mortality will be eclipsed for your love is a machination of the future. Whatever you believe, Edward my son, you know in your heart_ – at the words, my own tapped wildly in its trapping, vaulted, ribbed cage, wanting to escape the conflagration sucking all the bloody moisture from it –_phantoms live and humanity reigns._

I had no choice; the bonds that entranced me, from my midnight maven to this marauder completed a coil.

Or would.

_Someplace._

_Sometime._

Numbed through, I was helpless to react.

And we saw _her_ at the same time, together.

Was it his prediction or my trance?

_Dressed in clothing not of this epoch._

A desiccating burn harrowing my bones, killing my heart with each placid beat, I held to _her_ through my howling.

Spilling future love.

Apocalyptic.

Would she be the chosen noblewoman who would continue to inter me in this changeless armor? Or was she from a future I'd not yet fathomed? Another tale, a different vision, something more meaningful.

_Isabella Swan._

_

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~How do you feel about our young Edward?~

Thanks for the reviews and PM's thus far; your comments make me deliriously happy . And don't forget you can tweet me and Rebelward if you want, links are on my profile.

The real _Youth without Age and Life without Death_ folk story can be read here (I'm working with two different versions because some of the words vary):

www(DOT)childrenstories(DOT)ca/Stories/Youth-Without-Age-And-Life-Witho(DOT)html

The **Indie Twific Awards** have started and I've been nommed a fuckton (thanks, ladies)! The first round of voting runs from 2/20 – 3/02. Here's what I got goin' on there:

Best Love Triangle Complete_:_ _Incarcerated_

Best Secondary Characterization_:_ _Incarcerated_ for Maria

Love Conquers All Novella_:_ _Looking Glass_ and _Incarcerated_

Canon or AU that Knocks Your Socks Off Complete: _Incarcerated _and _Looking Glass_

Love Conquers All Oneshot_:_ _Jealousy _and _Surrender_

Go Vote and check out the fics! There's a huge amount of undiscovered talent to be found. Theindietwificawards(DOT)com.

Cheers, Rie~


	5. Wounded

Viola Cornuta and Vanessarae, thank you so much for helping me crank-up the content and do away with my glaringly terrible errors. Love to both of you exceptionally talented women!

Disclaimer: This is my story, it's just based around the Twilight characters.

I've taken the liberty of changing Esme's middle and surname to fit the setting, ancestry and time I want. Please forgive. This is as canon as I want it to be…Platt just doesn't work for me.

Most bits in italics are from _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_ by Robert Browning.

~~Just wanted to say, I am _completely_ stunned by the gorgeous reviews! And y'all have been most patiently waiting for this update, thank you~~

A very happy birthday to a woman of beauty, brains, and brilliance; Viola Cornuta!

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**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Four: Wounded**

**Esme Elise Snider **

"Fairy tales don't tell children dragons exist, children already know dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children dragons can be killed."  
— G.K. Chesterton

My story was already set in stone.

Like the lives of the people of Hamelin when the Mayor and the Corporation refused to pay the Pied Piper his due for ridding their town of the rat infestation.

_They lost all their children._

This fable would be morbid to an adult. To a child in my situation, it promised the healing of all ills, respite from the stingy meanness of elders, and deliverance to a land flocking with all the fantastical beauties a child could imagine!

More so, I had liked it simply because my mother sang the verses to me, when her voice was younger and freer and permitted to be heard.

It was also plain fact that this was the only volume we owned, besides Luther's German Bible.

The lie that would carve an epitaph to my tombstone and then compose a hosanna over my emptied grave was fabricated as soon as Papa saw the grisly bone jutting from my soft calf. My girlish gingham frock ruffed up like one of our Rhode Island Red's wings as she pecked the ground for feed in the farmyard of our rural Ohio homestead.

I'd outgrown that dress long ago, but the hem was lengthened with leftover yards of textile each year, as with all four of my shifts. Scrabbles of ribbon stitched and stuck on to cuffs, collar, tears, and tatters.

Tatters.

That's what I understood.

I was sixteen, and my future was stamped in tin-plate.

Our existence was isolated, my father made sure of that.

He wanted no witnesses to the punishment he preyed upon my mother with her imagined disobedience.

I hadn't fallen from a tree. I was sixteen, nearing womanhood, and I'd given up climbing as soon as my breasts had bud, not wanting the shame of a breeze to lift my skirts up to my thighs for all to see the curves I fought so hard, so shamefully, to hide. Even if no one was around.

The jostle of the wagon over each rut wounded me further. Sleek, cold, wet beads of sweat ran down my cheeks and into my mouth, wrenched open in mute pain.

Wheels creaked; the struts shifted and groaned and would need repair again next spring. Papa never lessened the pace on our furious way to the doctor's infirmary in town.

My mother was allowed to hold me in her lap, for once. To allay the jostling and jarring to my scraping, bared marrow. I almost felt spoiled.

I was never so clumsy as to harm myself, for that wouldn't do. I walked softly, on the toes of my feet. In a rare, frivolous mood, I pretended I was a ballerina; _a swan._

Papa usually picked up the weekly broadsheet in town to itemize the windfalls and losses on wheat crops while I squatted over the staining black ink for news of culture. I loved to read of the ballet and theater. Quietly, vigilantly, I would read aloud to Mutti while she swayed dear Schorsch to sleep.

I longed for more words on _Jeux_, though I wasn't even sure how to pronounce the foreign title. A ballet by Diaghilev, with music composed by a Frenchman named Debussy – one more name to caress, and strands of sound I never hoped to hear.

Quickly I read and committed to memory the idea of two gentlemen and a young girl playing a game of tennis of a slowly filtering, darkening night. A ball lost, a game of hide and seek…yet there was something more than my innocent mind could fathom.

The creak of the rocker hurried in time with Mutter's words, "_Sshhh, now._ He's coming." She set Schorsch to the cradle and helped me fold the paper, "Men are all about _hide and seek_, meine Liebling. Best you know that now."

Her wisdom was lost on me.

I just wanted to be away.

To fly.

To become someone else.

_A swan._

More likely, Papa made me out to be a clumsy, ugly duckling.

Crippling discipline made its way unto my body whenever I slipped, seldom though that was, or dribbled the last thick plate of churned butter, or slopped a scant inch off the frothy cream topping a pail of cow's milk.

Practicing comportment, in rare moments of freedom from watchfulness, I ran to the meadow and plaited crowns of cornflower and clover. I twirled in the sun's warmth and fancied it to be the embrace of ein Vater who didn't hit, eine Mutter who wasn't browbeaten, ein zukünftiger Geliebter who knew the meaning of love and play.

But, it was 1911. Mutti had burnt the rarebit stew because she was nursing little brother. In a milky, maternal haze, they'd fallen asleep in the spindly chair set against the lead-paned window leading out to the fields.

A hard _smack_ had drawn me from my innocent, infrequent, idylls of _Jeux_.

Racing down the bald ladder from my perch in the loft, I found Mama cowering over Schorsch, protecting him as she could no longer do me. Every stroke and word of affection towards me was met with pestilent gruffness, "You're spoilin' das Mädchen, Carolla!"

Like the wolf from whom he took his given name, Papa had slavered over her as his slobber slipped with sickening slowness in profuse white strings ribboning her trembling breasts she had not the chance to cover. The spittle was canine-like, revolting, and his eyes had blazed at the sight, as if he was seeing another man's release upon his patch when it was his own dribble sluicing over her like sputum from gullet.

Strands of saliva threaded with her still-leaking milk, and mein Bruder had whined and sought to suckle the foul mixture, not finished with his drink.

A hand raised, a boot pulled back, and Schorsch squalled, bringing too much attention to his eight-month-old self.

I would take his hard fist in my face, his boot to my stomach, if only to save Schorsch.

Shoving Mutti aside so she slid across the scratched, cracked tile floor, I then stood in her place, making sure she had my infant brother safely in her arms, and once more to her breasts.

Her eyes, a heavenly blue like mine, filled with tears. Her ears reddened, her cheeks caved with cries she knew she wasn't to give voice.

The jut of Papa's elbow near blinded my left eye.

It was followed by a flat-handed slap to my cheek.

And a chuck to my chin while he'd chortled, "Gonna' save your _Mutti_ now?"

Not satisfied with the too-pulpy meat of my face, he paced to Mama and laughed like a dog when she blanched and held Schorschto her teats. He swung his foot, quickly, through the murky air, halting just before it met the cartilage of her nose.

Like a pugilist, purposefully, Father had fallen straight back onto my upraised leg, tearing bone from socket, "_AHHHH!_" I screamed, beating the back of my loosened bonnet against the boards, my braids tangling around nail's heads.

As if he cared for my plight, haste was made to get me to town.

I now wandered in and out of fancies: the ballet, the Pied Piper… _escape from this hopelessness._

The paired horses raced over ruts and patches of mud and grass, spurred on by whip and the lethality of father's yell, "_Git on, Gretel, Liesl!"_

I never heard my mother's voice but for its near-silent, feminine subservience, until she shouted, "Gott in Himmel, Wolfram! Slow down!

One hand grappling the tugging reins, he whipped back and punched Mutter straight to her chin so she fell against me, and I cried at the sting flaring from my leg to my pelvis, like knives sharpening against the whet stone of my soul.

Quietly, we huddled together in the plankboard wagon bed, hugging and shushing each other. Both of us stifling more moans, the wet rag on my lower leg blooming like a wild rose with red, the dimpled chin of my mother blossoming with a crimson bruise turning rapidly to violent violet.

The broodmares pitched forward to a halt, and we toppled, agonizingly, against one another. Father, the only one unaffected, hopped down in front of the surgery with sundown looming.

It'd been one and a half hours since he'd broken my leg.

The ooze of blood was equally saturated with discoloring puss and the edges of the gash turned a bilious, rank yellowy-green.

Clinging to Mutti, I wept into her chest as she wrestled me from the wagon on her own.

"Shush child, or we'll all hurt more in the morning," her demand was softened with a kiss to my ear, "My baby girl," I heard her swallowing tears; "I love you. I wish I could protect you."

With not a whit to manners, father left the door ajar, barely. Mutter shouldered it open, her bony body holding me up alone.

Pounding the desk, Father demanded, "Where's Doc McLarey?"

The white half-door to the surgery beyond opened, and I gasped, my throbbing leg momentarily forgotten.

Smoothly the physician stalked out, appearing unruffled, but the look in his eyes was decidedly rankled, "Sir," he pacified my father and prodded him, with merely a curt nod, to one of the chairs by the window.

As if under magic, Father sat down.

He looked like the beady, rat-eyed mayor of Hamelin with his orbs dilated and his mouth shut, for once.

Compassionately, the white-coated figure ushered his clerk to the back. She was also his nurse. Benignly, he made his way to Mutter and I, ingesting the sight of my punctured leg, running a hand across what seemed to be his silently howling mouth. There was a pitiless tilt to his plush lips when he turned to my father whose posture was disconcertingly straight as if he were at a town hall meeting.

And yet, the doctor benevolently addressed us, in two minds, of two bodies, "Ma'am, Miss." Taking me from my mother's embrace, he caught me in arms that were the fashioning of a barrel's straps, all iron and strong, "You may follow me, ma'am."

Father rose to half off his seat and halted with one turn of the doctor's head in his direction.

Those eyes of his were unbelievable! Perhaps I was delirious with discomfort, but they were the color of maple sap dripping from trivet to pail. They were neither too large nor too small. Staring at him, I had not the blood left in me to flush when he turned from his snake-charming gaze at father to my own fevered look. His smile softened from the ramrod straight thing he'd aimed at Papa, and as he hooked me closer to him, he lifted my legs with ease, "Come, young lady, let's have a look at you."

The cool from his form ran over me, numbing the ache that was racing in wild, red streaks of crosshatched skin from my open calf to the top of my thigh. Sighing, I closed my lids and felt the first twinge of relief for a very long time.

Perhaps ever.

Setting me tenderly on a long, narrow table, he smoothed loose curls from my brow, held two fingers to the beaming pulse in my neck and took time with his watch.

Mutti shouldered into the opposite corner of the room, more pale than I.

Hearing him speak quietly to his nurse, then evenly to Mutter, "Ma'am, I'm Doctor Cullen. I'm going to take good care of your daughter now," I fell in and out of awareness, perhaps in my own trance with the smooth rain of his timbre a sweet breath to my ear more used to shouting and ranting.

Disoriented, I watched him sluggishly, hearing a recital of one of my favorite passages of _The Pied Piper_ as if it were being recited now:

_And he himself was tall and thin,  
With sharp blue eyes, each like a pin,  
And light loose hair, yet swarthy skin  
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin,  
But lips where smile went out and in;  
There was no guessing his kith and kin:  
And nobody could enough admire  
The tall man and his quaint attire.  
Quoth one: "It's as my great-grandsire,  
Starting up at the Trump of Doom's tone,  
Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!''_

Kindly, he eyed the patches to my skirt, the hay sticking in my hair from its snarling in the wagon bed. He took up sharp shears and parted the old cloth that could just as easily be torn by hand to the juncture of my legs, and parted the faded fabric. Untying my high boots, he delicately opened the tongue and released my swelling foot to air.

The chase of engorgement down my leg dizzied me.

His smile never wavered, nor did the concentrated concern with which he watched my expressions. A cold cloth was swept across my forehead as the nurse bathed me of dirt road grime plastered to my face with spent tears.

My stocking was lowered so slowly, I arched up and then cried out through the gory pain sacking me again! What had felt like an erotic act ended in complete anguish, "Mein Gott, außer mir!" I yelled and didn't care for the consequences this one time!

"Be still, please, if you can," his brow was tight, his eyes slits, and he appeared more in pain than me.

Once freed from the ripped woolen covering, my leg spasmed. At first, the physician inspected it with only his scrutiny, his hands hovering aloft.

I daren't look.

Mutter had faced the wall, her shoulders quivering.

"Mr. Snider." His voice again turned to that cutting tone, brooking no disobedience as he beckoned my father into the examining room. He was like the Pied Piper, and my father was under his spell when he meekly shuffled through the door, fouling the air of the cleansed, whitewashed room.

_I'm able,  
By means of a secret charm, to draw  
All creatures living beneath the sun,  
That creep or swim or fly or run,  
After me so as you never saw!_

Perceptibly, I shook.

"How did your daughter-"

"Esme." Mother turned.

"How did Esme come by her injury?" My caretaker had risen from his stool at my side, leaving me unprotected. He and his assistant systematically gathered instruments and vials so shiny each surface was reflective.

Not so far gone he'd be honest, untruths unfolded effortlessly in my father's bluff voice, "The little imp was climbing a tree. I done told her she'd only come to harm." A forcible stiffening of Doctor Cullen's shoulders rounded muscle to the surface of his sterile coat. "Well, she fell. Of course." Father shrugged his meaty shoulders and shoved his fists into the pockets of his trousers, but didn't have the manliness to show shame for what he'd done nor the lie he'd just told.

In a clipped manner, the physician dismissed both my parents, "You may leave us, Mr. and Mrs. Snider. My nurse and I will have Esme put to rights in no time. And we'll see to your contusion after, Mrs. Snider." He added, making it known he wasn't fooled by Papa's bluster.

All the time, his smile was effortless but the tight rope of his jaw bunched… _in anger?_

Quietly, quickly murmuring, the doctor came back to me and his nurse placed her hand on his back, steadying him and whispering calming words.

I envied that touch.

His hands relaxed into worshipful, curative implements; he brushed his assistant aside to purify my cuts, scrapes, and the long slash along the front of my lower leg with antiseptic himself.

By now I was without sensation from my knee down.

Even so, I gathered his touch would never harm me.

His was the first kindness I'd known – aside from my mother when Wolfram was away and she was allowed to act on her maternal instincts. The more she cherished Schorsch and me, the more trouble brewed like a destructive storm in all our directions. Hails of insults, gusts of beatings, the tornado of Father's arms as he railed, "You waste your time on those good-fer-nothings, Carolla!"

A little cage of wires with a square of gauze was held a couple inches over my mouth and nose as the nurse dripped liquid ether to the ticking. Mesmerized by the _plip plop,_ I sank into the candied vapor gratefully.

I woke, reticently, to harsh low words between Papa and Doctor Cullen, whose mercurial eyes were flaked with specks of black.

Animal-like, a rumble pounced out from the otherwise placid physician.

To be sure, there were two sides to this man.

I passed briefly back to unconsciousness.

_And folks who put me in a passion  
May find me pipe after another fashion._

I woke to the spokes turning, tumbling us down the gravel road. The enchantment broken, Father fuming, "Why, who does he think he is? Telling me how to raise my family, threatening to come after me?" The reins bit into the swaybacks of the horses as we gathered speed through the night. "He ain't normal, I'll tell you that, Carolla. The way he looked at me, making me like to see double. And his hand on my arm was like a bear trap. Nuthin' normal about that doctor. Good goddamned thing he's leaving soon because I'd like to have him run out of town." His yarns of spit were like those foaming at our horses' mouths, "That _Cullen_ with his Americanized name. Ain't fooling no one. With a surname like that he was nothing more than the high and mighty city dwellers of Koeln."

_Koeln. Cologne. _I sank back into Mutter's lap and sighed when she plaited my hair, combing through sweaty tresses with her hard-worked, calloused fingers. _Cologne._ I wasn't thinking of Germany, but of the doctor, and his scent.

With the breeze of clover and honeycomb and maple in my nose, my mother's hands in my hair, my father's raiding spite washing unheard over my ears, I fell asleep.

_~~ll~~_

I slept for a long time.

Like a fairytale maiden.

In a stupor I walked from task to task, my hands complying, and my mind elsewhere.

For six years, I was little more than an inward-bound Arbeitspferd, a workhorse of my motherland.

The farm was my workhouse from sixteen to twenty-two, as if I'd been frozen in place by the nurturing of Doctor Cullen. Until my life would change again.

Rather than renouncing his abusive nature after the bold and useless warning from Doctor Cullen, Papa continued to intimidate us with his fists and vindictive insults. Even three against one, we were outnumbered.

Schorsch was still too small.

Mother and I united to protect him.

Things became worse with the onset of The Great War. Farmhands absconded to play their part with patriotic spirits.

We were demeaned further as _useless, helpless layabouts._ Mouths to feed that couldn't earn their keep. Distancing myself, I referred to father as Wolfram in my head, not as the man who'd beget me… but a savage stranger, for that's what he was.

He did alter one course after that night. He made sure the maltreatment he maliciously bestowed upon us went unseen. Upon our torsos, mostly, or high up on our arms and legs, above our hairlines. And though there were fractures and concussions, he was never so careless again to actually break a bone.

For that I was thankful.

I bound my breasts and wore the loosest of skirts, not that I had a choice; all my garb was singularly ugly. I only bathed when Father was out working the fields. He never came at me in that manner, but I felt unwholesome in his presence nonetheless.

Dog-eared and hanging together by a very loose binding, pages yellowing with age like the oilcloth on our scarred table, I caressed _The Pied Piper of Hamelin_. Flat and square, the dark green cover was warped through use, stained with my fingerprints, and the watercolor illustrations had faded to soft pastel hues. Now there was a new reason this legend was my favorite… for that mysterious troubadour, that otherworldly magician, put me in mind of Doctor Cullen, whose gleaming stethoscope was like the flute.

_And at the scarf's end hung a pipe;  
And his fingers, they noticed, were ever straying  
As if impatient to be playing  
Upon this pipe, as low it dangled  
Over his vesture so old-fangled_

He lived in my dreams, my waking thoughts, my memories, as a keepsake that somewhere there was beauty and humanity.

All the while I waited for some sort of just desserts, something similar to the townspeoples' loss of their young ones, to befall Father.

I trusted.

With my hope chest sitting against the cracked black leather of the canopied, mustard seed-colored contraption, I was married away from the Sniders to the Evansons. The Model T lugged along like our conversation, gears sticking uncomfortably. The spring breeze through absent windows wasn't quite warm. When we came upon a steep hill, Charles broadly grinned, spun the auto around and made its peak in reverse – the little carburetor, like the little engine that couldn't, had to be coaxed through ingenuity over precipitous inclines.

I believed this move would be my escape!

_Remarkably, I still had hope. What else was there but this trunk filled with faith for the future amidst the bleak plains of my past rolling behind me as Charles' beaten, dusty Model T carried me away from two decades of castigation._

I didn't imagine I'd see my mother alive again. At only thirty-nine, she appeared brittle like dried, burnt wood, ashy as its dust at the bottom of the woodstove of a morning when I scraped it out and started the fire over again to heat the chicory in our chipped, blue, enamel pot.

On saying goodbye, smelling Schorsch's sweet musk of baby and young boy, I wrapped him up in my arms and wished I could carry him away with me. I kissed his plump, pink cheek and begged, "Be safe, kleiner Mann." _Little man, hide. Hide yourself away!_

I rounded to my mother, and we rocked together as she murmured through choking tears that meshed us both together as they always had, "_Run, Esme. Run."_

They said Charles was of good, strong stock, German heritage, second generation, like me.

The ride to his farm was silent apart from the rattletrap heaving backwards over the hill.

It didn't fill me with hope.

Charles was solicitous at first. For a week or so, as I settled in. A strapping _Bursche_ with his own acreage and a small but homey log cabin, he permitted me to get the lay of the land.

Before he laid his hands on me.

The ones that had masculinely cranked the handle of his automobile.

I became used to the adversity of this solitary life, far from our neighbors, my family, and the very few friends I'd made.

I became used to the strap as it whizzed across still air, ruffling the plain, sackcloth curtains to hit my ass, my threadbare petticoats lifted to aid Charles' aim.

Biting my inner cheek, blinking back the burn of tears so they wouldn't fall and further soil my dress, I stoutly took my lot.

I did _not_ become used to the sodomy, another soiled trespass into my buttocks.

Even knowing I was unprepared for bodily congress, I'd been disarmed by the violence with which Charles forced himself upon me, into me. Now I recognized the sounds wailing from me, belatedly and out-of-body, for what they were. Perfect imitations of the bereft, nightly keening of my mother.

Now it seemed I'd had a lifetime of learning.

In the dark, while Charles flopped flatly onto his back to commence his deep, loud, smelly slumber, I hastened to the washstand and wiped myself clean of his entrance and sweat. Returning to our maligned matrimonial bed, I curled a square of the windowpane quilt under my cheek and in my fist, like a baby's blanket. Just something to hold onto.

_I just needed something to hold onto._

There was one difference however; every morn I was met by Charles' guilt and apologies, near apoplectic with the hateful intrusions he committed upon my body.

His remorse was never long lived.

Even while I mourned another lost bit of myself, I wondered, _did I still dream of better?_

I had letters, on scraps of used-up parcels, from Mutter. Only two counties over, it felt like a continent, and I preferred it that way. Like mother, like daughter. I'd been encouraged into a marriage with yet another abusive man.

The last I'd heard Papa had met his end, fittingly. In the thresher.

I didn't go to his funeral, choosing silent rejoicing to the farce of grief.

My lips curled at the justice.

_~~ll~~_

I'd nearly lost all hope.

The sexual abuse was worse, far worse than anything I'd met at Father's hands – because I was his chattel, his wife, Charles took as he saw fit. With Father, it was preordained and routine. With my hateful husband it was more about surprise. Never a nice one. From dawn to dusk, I didn't know if he'd come to me with a handful of the cornflowers I used to braid together and fit to my head, or if he'd lock me in his brawny arms until I near suffocated. The morning's regret was nothing but backhanded compliments anymore, "Esme, you made a mess of the bed last night. Could you at least get the washboard out and clean off your own stains today?"

Lounging, like a spoiled pasha in his chair so it creaked on its back legs, he'd blow across his chicory, sickening me with the pleasure he gained from watching all color leech from my face – the only discoloration from me were tears meeting cloth.

In a turmoil I erased like chalk to a schoolhouse board, his was the filth and swine I sought to forget. With rolled-up cigarettes on the back porch while I viewed the sun starve her embrace across the flat pink and blue and wheat-gold landscape.

_The wheat and gold of our crops harked back to the physician._

With those pulls of tobacco, I settled and relaxed, as much as I could, knowing Charles would be working the fields until late afternoon at least. And I let Doctor Cullen manifest once more.

_And green and blue his sharp eyes twinkled,  
Like a candle-flame where salt is sprinkled;_

Only his eyes, piercing and bright, were firelight and amber flame.

I felt, oddly, pledged to him. A man I'd never see again in all likelihood.

_~~ll~~_

It was only one year, more or less. I had survived ten months, or thereabouts.

Thankfully, Charles went to war. Ever the coward, he waited until he was conscripted.

This was the first time I'd been on my own!

I aired the mattress and moved the bed.

I boxed up Charles' leftover belongings and boarded them in the barn.

I smashed his mug on the floor and stamped it into dust.

I even let the prickly shards sit on the linoleum for an entire day before cleaning it up.

Opening windows, dusting surfaces, lighting oil lamps, I worked into the night.

I made runners from scraps and flimsy sky-blue curtains from an older dress, and an oval braided rug from cloths I'd saved.

Laying out saucers of milk, I invited the barn cats in.

Heaping charcoal onto the brazier, I slept that first night out in the open room.

And I didn't wake to nightmares.

Just the hug of my quilt. The one I'd brought from home. The pattern smelling of cedar, box hedges, and greenery.

Like _him._

Not of the cedar box I desired Charles to end up in.

I was liberated.

Thinking this small plot might become my own piece of earth, Gottwillen, I increased our crop by hiring a couple men who'd been looked over by Uncle Sam as being unfit due to their older, or younger, ages. First setting them to clearing an unused rock-strewn meadow, I bade them to plant it up with wheat. The commodity was in high demand due to our government supplying food to her Allies in the War.

The money I made from this venture was my own. The first currency to ever belong solely to me.

I stashed it in my sewing bag by adding an extra lining, even though Charles was not here.

A terribly understocked lender's library opened up in town. It was a four-mile walk, there and back, but on the days I was able to finish my chores--and now Charles'--before lunch (a feat which only transpired when I woke long before the sun and the roosters) I scurried to that sanctuary with my satchel. As it was the transport that brought me to this place, I ignored the jalopy in preference to my own feet. I nearly took an ax to the Model T's guts. Walking rapidly, I returned home and by late evening I sat, a young old woman, in the single rocking chair with my shawl about my shoulders. I read late into the night with no man to bemoan the waste of tapers dripping their tallow, simply so I could feign intelligence.

_Anne of the Island_ and _Anne's House of Dreams_ found their way home with me more often than not. I never tired of Anne Shirley's tales as a young woman with her Gilbert. Smart as a whip, not pandered to, but earning by personality and hard work all she gained, I admired Anne. Making her own livelihood as a teacher, her Gilbert Blythe also a doctor, I envied her for living my dream.

Instead I inhabited the farmhouse of nightmares.

Except those waking horrors and worries had left me with Charles' absence.

To be replaced by revived imaginings of Doctor Cullen. Just his name as a thought across my lips brought a bounce to my step, a flip to my curls, an invigorated clarity to my eyes.

_Doctor Cullen._

Anne married Gilbert, as was foretold so long ago. It all seemed so deliciously easy! Anne became a mother. Not once did Gilbert raise his hand, nor even his voice, to his cherished sweetheart.

_I wondered what Doctor Cullen would be like as a husband. A lover. _A man who would take his time pleasuring me with the feel of his skin sliding over mine, his hands lifting me up onto him instead of beating me down under him. I wondered about the silk of his pale, carnation lips that were long and full and masculine. I considered his hands that were large and capable of making me lose my composure even when he only attempted to relieve me.

_My_ dreams rapidly turned into torrid affairs brought about by a body's longing so ruthlessly denied.

And I breathed, freely.

_~~ll~~_

When I received the telegraph stating in brusque black and white Charles had been shot, I prayed the injury would prove mortal.

It did not.

Not even one year and he was sent back stateside, disabled, bandaged and testier than ever. Now I was not just his punching bag, but also his nursemaid. The wrappings around his shin oozed, his hair was patchy and balding in places on his pate where lice had gotten a firm foothold. Trench foot coupled with the lesion hobbled him so he walked with a limp. None of these things quelled his temper or stopped his pummeling. Rather, emasculated, the wrongs to his body inflamed the beast who'd returned home. Maimed, he now had stars and stripes and service to add to his repertoire of reasons I wasn't worthy of more than maltreatment.

In fact, Charles was remarkably swift when he wanted to get to me.

I had _hoped_ his time as a soldier would imbue him with some sense of humility, his brush with death would make him capable of love instead of hate.

I was wrong. He was more hardened.

Now his night terrors combined with my own.

Panic that woke me with his drenched body slaking atop me, his wild penis beating into me.

_Hope?_

Perhaps. In the repository of my womb.

There was to be a baby.

I wept with bliss. I cried with the futility of it all.

My adolescent and then womanly fantasies about my one-time physician would not be turned off.

_What if he were my husband?_

But, most decidedly, he was not.

Even while Charles appreciated my new roundness with rough meaty twists of my nipples so dark violet rings would circle my sensitive flesh in an hour or two, he accompanied the bodily assault with, "Been eating more than you're fair share, have ye? Well, I think it's time you were put on rations."

He didn't know what caused my growing plumpness, and I didn't recoil as that would cause more misuse, endangering my baby.

I was with child.

And all should have been right.

Iron strength and determination woke me from my twenty-five year trance. Knowing I was nurturing a little being inside of me stirred and stoked me. Roused me, and made me brew in regrets.

_Why had I stayed?_

The little nudger of a bump against the hill of my palm told me.

_So I would be a mother to this child._

I brought Charles his liquor; I cleansed his wound and changed the cloths. I bedded down with him. I waited for him to come 'round from his challenging nightmares to take me with force.

Then I did as I'd been told. That thing I'd never considered before. _Run, baby girl, run!_

I would not have my bairn raised this way. I would _not _be my mother.

_~~ll~~_

My cousin Anneke provided my haven. In 1920, Milwaukee. Embodying every trait I'd never been allowed to exhibit, she was festive, funny, bold! Though my junior by two years, she clucked over me like a mother hen.

I'd never been so loved, so spoiled, so cared for.

Except when Doctor Cullen had cured me.

I'd never had so much… _fun_.

Our tiny house was bright and lively! There were soft curtains and carpets and matching dishes. A kitchen and parlor and two bedrooms! _My own bed, in a room, with a door I could lock._ We had electricity, indoor plumbing, _and a bathtub._

She cut and styled my lank, toffee hair into a springy bob that lifted like the smile I was unaccustomed to, and we both admired its fresh, glowing fullness.

No longer beaten by the sun or bruised by Charles, my complexion lost its ruddy, patchy pallor and became creamy.

Inspecting myself in the mirror, I looked braver. Alive.

We went to the moving pictures, and I shielded my eyes from the enormous screen until Anneke laughingly pulled my arm away.

I borrowed from her extensive, ready-made wardrobe until my prodding belly no longer fit. Then I made my own beautiful, sumptuous, drop-waist, calf-length shifts with pleats to sit about my rotund hips and growing womb. Inside the loose-fitting tops, with ruffles around my collarbone, my breasts filled out the material.

I was a woman.

I found I liked wearing red lipstick and pretty silky clothing.

I was still leery of men's advances.

I still rose, terrified, from bad dreams of Charles chasing me about the homestead. Yet, increasingly, I sleepily swam in the warmth generated from my baby girl, knowing she would never have to run, and fell to slumber with Doctor Cullen inside my thoughts.

At first my own laughter startled me, and I flinched as if from a hand about to strike. My joy, my very _essence_ so long lost like the town's children in _The Pied Piper of Hamelin._

This liberation took some getting used to.

A shortage of teachers made it easy for me to get work. More pragmatic, enterprising young women were now to be found in factories.

This occupation was everything I'd opined it to be!

My little schoolroom was tidy, clean, and mine alone. My students were eager, boisterous, quite often naughty and up to no good, but I cajoled them with sternness on one hand and a novel ease of good nature on the other.

Anneke _tsked_ and scolded me when I hid my first paycheck in that little, stained volume I'd grown up with instead of depositing it in Layton State Bank.

More frivolous than the movie shows were the evenings we spent at the dancehall. Turner Ballroom was our local, and we were frequent weekend visitors.

The first few times I was petrified by the crowds dancing the Charleston. I shook my head in denial whenever my hand was asked for. I sipped my drink and smoked my Lucky Strikes and rubbed my belly and laughed so fully at Anneke's antics, at once daring and silly and seductive.

A time or two, my cousin brought a man home. She begged my permission, "Are you at rights?"

"Please, Annie," she trilled to my shortening of her name, I was getting the hang of things, "I'm not your Mutti." I towed her aside and whispered, "For your own pleasure?"

Avidly she nodded her head and her grin wasn't to be questioned.

Thirsty, crampy, I woke. Taking the stairs, I came up short to Annie's moans. At her door, I listened, my hand raised to knock. I was on the verge of barging in when her "_Oh no more, please!_" turned into a sultry, long groan, _"More, Teddy, please!"_

Stepping quietly back, I fumbled to the kitchen and drank a glass of water. _So, it was true? There was more to be had in the bedroom than horror?_

I'd missed so much.

At the top step of the staircase, I met the bare chest of a man. My nose skimmed his broad shoulder. With a bow of leave, he cheerily let me pass. Anneke, sticking her head out the door, cheekily laughed.

I gathered my gown and leapt on my bed, my face flaming.

But I was happy; my cousin gave me hope.

Once I finally broke free of the stockade of brutality that had imprisoned me for most of my life, I smiled more easily. I discovered I could make people happy. I uncovered love. I'd never be superficially coy or flirtatious though; my passions ran far deeper than that.

In the end, I wasn't averse to dancing with a dapper, polite man, now and again. They smelled so good, were so strong and capable and gallant.

I almost wanted to take one of the nameless swains home.

_But I never did._

Once again at Turner Hall, in late February, 1921, I was overheated from watching couples come and go in a desirous Tango. The large, peony pink rosette low on my hip was crumpled against the black silk of my gown. I waved my fingers at Anneke and mimed I'd be right outside.

_I spied him first. _

Leaving the crush of packed bodies, heat flashed through me from the living furnace in my belly and a trickle of sweat fell from my pageboy down the nape of my neck into the lifted frilled collar of my jacket. I lingered in the entrance and lit a cigarette from my silver case. Wary as ever, my eyes peered up and down the length of 4th Street.

And there he was. As if time had stood still. A fine specimen, debonair, dressed in the luxurious evening attire of a single-breasted tailcoat over a white shirt and waistcoat, the slit flaps lifted over his derriere with each stride. Huddling back into the shadows, I was breathless.

Shuffling in my tiny patent heels, my ankles puffed against the slim strap from standing too long, just as my left foot had swelled when blood was unconstricted from the Doctor's caring fingers taking off my boot before tending my broken leg.

My jet beads, borrowed from Anneke, chimed against the still, crisp air.

_Doctor Cullen._

As if sensing my observation, he looked to his companion. Not one word passed between them, but standing beneath a Harp luminaire, every expression on their faces made it seem as though they held a mute conversation.

Flattening myself to the corner of the glass door, I mused girlishly that my plump belly would appear as a full moon, a globe, to the streetlights. Disembodied from me.

Stifling a giggle, I ran both hands over my stomach; my girl was kicking with my rush of adrenaline. Imagining she could hear me, I shushed the babe in my womb with a finger to my lips and subdued my own titters.

There was a flimsy paper flier stuck to the heel of my shoe and it irritated me. Sweaty, distraught, confused, and filled with weird glee, I lifted my leg and tore the page from my sole. It advertised fortune telling at the upcoming State's Fair.

I didn't realize my calf, with its long, serrated scar merely muted by my one pair of silk stockings, raised out to the pool of light. Not until a muttered curse filtered to my ear and I looked worriedly back to the two men.

He turned on his heel so gracefully, like a lion, and started his stalk towards me. Those hands that had healed me were lowered, and I didn't know how, but it seemed he could see into the obscure niche enveloping me.

With him was a man of flaming unnatural hair and pastel skin who, though he seemed of similar age, held not the wise stature of the doctor. Apart from their similarity in age they appeared almost like father and son.

I was glad Doctor Cullen wasn't with a woman.

The doctor advanced.

His arms were raised to envelop me like the storminess clouding his expression.

From the billowing gust of the streetlamp the other man's voice, so velvety smooth it tumbled like liquid to cool me, beseeched, "Carlisle."

_Carlisle._

_Carlisle Cullen._

The physician halted midway to me, straightened, jutted his face forward for one more, closer, piercing look. Abruptly, quickly, he made his way back to his companion, and they hastened on.

There were several backwards glances in my direction.

_~~ll~~_

In the days to come, like a giddy girl, I twirled about his name and scribed it to my lesson book.

_Doctor Carlisle Cullen._

Another month passed. My time was growing near. Annaliese Carolla Snider made her presence known. Tickling my ribs, causing thick, golden fluid to leak in fat drops from my nipples so I woke with wetness across my breasts.

My hips broadened more. My skin and hair shone.

I grew in confidence, never airy, but shrewd. Never a novice, but capable and strong. Resolute and rejoicing!

A survivor replenished.

I enjoyed every twinge, every push and shove, every novel capricious motion of my babe as she fed from me and made me blossom with vitality.

Walking to the schoolhouse one morning, I saw him again.

I would never mistake him!

He really hadn't aged.

He didn't appear to recognize me.

We passed, nodding politely while my heart pitter-patted like the slap of little feet I'd hear soon.

To my delight, our meetings became more and more frequent. From the simple, undemonstrative 'Good morning', our conversation leapt.

There was compassion and comfort in his voice as he took in my full-to-bursting body… then there was carnality.

All the things I craved and needed.

_Was this all by chance or orchestration?_

I didn't care.

I made sure to run my left hand from my neck to my stomach so he could clearly see there was no wedding ring.

Near every morning for two weeks, we passed one another with mere pleasantries until one day he made a satin wrap of his voice to beguile me, "Esme?"

My breath shook into a slow smile, warming as the sun's rays while I whispered, "_Pied Piper."_

He frowned slightly but also looked ready to grin as he savored the nickname.

_And I must not omit to say  
That in Transylvania there's a tribe  
Of alien people who ascribe  
The outlandish ways and dress  
On which their neighbours lay such stress,  
To their fathers and mothers having risen  
Out of some subterraneous prison_

He was just as beautiful as all my memories; the one dream I'd held above all the nightmares. His tawny eyes and caramel hair and perpetual youthfulness didn't fool me.

He inhabited my being with his differentness. I remembered how shaken, yet undeterred, Father had been after the intimidation inside Carlisle's surgery. No man had ever scared Wolfram so, the devil take his soul.

The morning after he'd spoken my name, I waited on a bench for his approach. With the stealthy elegance of his footfalls a soft lullaby to my heart, I patted the seat.

As a lover, he presented me with rare chocolate and two ripe, juicy oranges, "One for you," he looked to my mouth as if envisioning the trickle of sweet pulp drenching my lips. Grinning widely he motioned to my belly, "One for the babe."

Close up, I gathered his worry. For, even though I'd been wracked with pain and horror and peril at the time, I'd paid close attention to the doctor's appearance. And he was not one whit older.

Not at all.

Aware of my perusal, he titled his head, rested his hand over mine on the wooden plank between us, and a tiny chagrined curvature of his lip looked both sly and shy, "Yes."

And thus I knew he was not a man.

I _knew_ he had awakened the ardent woman in me.

I knew scintillation.

I knew my body could be a home.

_I knew hope. And the truth._

They said dragons couldn't be tamed. And they were right. I _knew_ from experience; I'd made their acquaintance, been raised and bedded by them. But Carlisle Cullen was no monster, no matter his breed.

_I can't forget that I'm bereft  
Of all the pleasant sights they see,  
Which the Piper also promised me.  
For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,  
Joining the town and just at hand,  
Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,  
And flowers put forth a fairer hue,  
And everything was strange and new;  
The sparrows were brighter than peacocks here,  
And their dogs outran our fallow deer,  
And honey-bees had lost their stings,  
And horses were born with eagles' wings;  
And just as I became assured  
My lame foot would be speedily cured,  
The music stopped and I stood still,  
And found myself outside the hill,  
Left alone against my will,  
To go now limping as before,  
And never hear of that country more!''_

_

* * *

  
_

~What do you think of Esme's plight, and the light of Carlisle shining so brightly towards her through the dark?~

_The Pied Piper of Hamelin, _by Robert Browning, was suggested by the lovely Viola Cornuta (thank you!) www(DOT)indiana(DOT)edu/~librcsd/etext/piper/

Okay! I think you can still vote for Twific Indies Awards (me, _Incarcerated_ and a whole slew of other amazing, under-read, underappreciated stories). Today's your last day to show some love to the underdogs!

With one of my closest friends, a woman and writer I admire a ridiculous amount, (**winterstale**) I wrote a novella: _The Tigresse of Csejte._ Go now and read. It's sensual, scary, scintillating, spine-chilling, toe-curling, historical, and full of surprises! I also wholly recommend _The Garden_ by winterstale (or anything else, for she writes with her entire heart and soul).

Here's a bit of a wild, wet, wily, and off-the-wall (slightly) outtake I wrote for my fabulously formidable friend RowanMoon: it's _Call of the Wild_ in her _Broken Doll Pieces and Shards_ (these are outtakes from her supernatural, LEGENDARY completed fic, _Broken Doll_). Fanfiction(DOT)net/s/5772370/2/Broken_Doll_Pieces_and_Shards

Miss AngryBadgerGirl and Rebelward gave it a whirl on the Double Wide's porch couch! You're damn right it was funny! It's in _Dead Confederates_, of course: _Put a Little South in Your Mouth._

And, finally (I know! I've been busy!) I'm going to end _Surrender_ with a final chapter soon, so make sure you have it on alert.

Cheers, Rie~


	6. Worship

Thanks to my two super sexy betas; Viola Cornuta and Vanessarae.

**Most enormous love to Vi for the quote...she's my go-to gal. Extra hugs to my gal, winterstale (honestly, read her fics y'all), for being brilliant and always there, and unquestionably compassionate.**

Shout-out to AngryBadgerGirl for the pre-read.

Love, love, love to all the DW women; I'd be so freakin' bored without y'all to play with; same to some extra-special h00rs on Facebook.

Disclaimer: No, I don't.

~~ This baby won't be too long, possibly ten to fifteen chapters? I am going to take you down the rabbit hole though – next chapter will take us to present day.~~

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Five: Worship**

**Carlisle Cullen**

_Great passions grow into monsters in the dark of the mind, but if you share them with loving friends, they remain human, they can be endured._

_~The Medea by Euripedes_

More than a sire, I wanted to be Edward's father.

His cagey death-rattle overpowered my resistance to his mother's plea to take his life and turn him into a blood-lover like me. Pressing her diamond ring to my hand, she beseeched one final time, rising from her catafalque with barely a reedy breath left, "I was told, before Edward's birth, by a _ghicitoare_--_Mortality will be eclipsed for _his _love is a machination of the future. Whatever you believe, Eliza, you know in your heart, phantoms live and humanity reigns._"

I assented, mutely. Nary an emotion stole across my face though every long-petrified impulse within me clamored with terror at what I was about to undertake, and just what I might gain in making her Edward my son.

Nothing on earth--not my mutated make-up, my speed and skill at killing, nor the unstoppable stampede of death over life–was more formidable than a mother's love for her child. Witnessing something I'd only noted once before, in the rural outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, while I'd tended the shattered leg of a girl-woman named Esme Snider, I colluded to kill this lady's son.

I remembered the adolescent girl who'd come to me with a florid, reeking, effluvent, foul father and a meek, beaten mother. She was never far from my flagellating mind. Too worried over my own secret existence, I'd done little more than repair her bones, show her tenderness, and allow the drippings of venom-encrusted words threaten Wolfram Snider, "If I ever hear of another broken bone upon the body your daughter, I will take you to the thresher, feet first, and rejoice at your grisly screams as farm machinery slices up through every inch of pathetic waste you are." I'd leaned closer, towering over the shaken, shifty abuser, "The spikes will tear up your legs, your _manhood_," he'd paled further and cupped himself, "your viscera, and you'll feel it all because your heart will still be pounding. That organ will finally burst." I'd smiled malignly. "Your brain still alive to all the snapping of nerves exploding, I rather think you'll still suffer until the baler eats through your skull, crunching, crushing."

He'd looked like he was on the verge of vomiting as his own daughter had, softly and sadly, disgracefully apologizing, when the ether had worn off after the small surgery I'd performed on her.

His eyes teared and his mouth trembled, and I wanted to push him over the edge, so I'd snarled against his ear, my lips curled back over little-used, hungry incisors.

He smelled of urine and perhaps other incontinence as he'd backed out of my surgery.

Odious excuse for a man.

The blades of my teeth, the curl of my alloy fists took hours to loosen after I'd seen them off.

Through my entire life, _my very, very long existence,_ I'd made it my duty to always think and act as a gentleman. Yet the voracious desire to protect from one meeting with Esme, the young lady of caramel locks and shy demeanor and guileless beauty, pushed me closer to my fevered caprices than ever before.

This urge to foster and defend, like the call to arms of a crusader–to serve an innocent from a pestilent person–turned me combative and furious. I'd wanted to kill a human being not to drink from him, but to give in to utter violence.

An eye-for-an-eye. That was certainly a sermon I remembered well from my father's country parish church in the middle ages.

_Why hadn't I done more?_ This time I would.

As Elizabeth Masen's ranting tamped down like a tallow wick dripping the last of its wax to a saucer, she whispered through the fallen copse of her esophagus, "_Taci, fiul meu, si i'll-ti dea tinerilor fara virsta si viata fara moarte. _Be quiet, my son, and I'll give you youth without age and life without death_._" She sighed, a thick, mucusy thing, and died. I gently closed her eyelids over the fern-green fronds of her orbs that had already become hazy.

I hung her words from the Romany legend like I wore my stethoscope about my neck. To be polished and whittled and fiddled with later.

Sitting upon his sick-dampened cot in my ward just moments before I did his mother's bidding, the waxy, wild face that twisted mournfully reappeared to me as the young man I'd interrupted not two weeks earlier in the private box during Swan Lake. Then, he had held vitality inside of his body; it swam with a pink, fruity flush to his cheeks, a spark of dance lighting up his warm, weary, mossy eyes.

At the infirmary, a near corpse, the influenza made a putrid mess of his organs, physicality leaked from him one second at a time. That last moment of his life turning to death, becoming immortality, with his blood a hot course, a current rushing into my mouth, I saw through time and corporeality into the escape of his thoughts. Trespassing his visions, I watched the blaze-white woman with him.

_Isabella Swan._

I didn't know who she was. But the breath of her name on his final exhalation was a deliverance.

_Edward's love is a machination of the future._

Crying, screaming, hollering, and bellowing, Edward's outbursts found me floundering! _What had I done? So very selfish._

Ampoule upon syringe of morphine, which I stole from the locked, glass cabinet, made not one bit of difference. Moving Edward in the dead of night to my house, his affliction brought back the agony that had made me want to rip my hands from my body, the growling, stringent cries of his were mine almost two hundred and eighty years ago while I'd pummeled my face, my chest, trying to beat the demon fire of making a monster out of me.

All I could do was keen with him, bethinking the gore. Restrain his arms and legs so all that moved was his torso, youthful and bared, bending upright into an arch that lunged up and up and up until I feared his back would break and my burden would increase ten thousand fold.

As if locked into a grand mal seizure, Edward remained in that posture, wailing for three long days. Over hours, his skin stopped perspiring. His features caught in the moment. The rigor mortis of a vampire in the making.

His voice, the tone formerly deep and melodious, became short and rough through unrelenting shouts and bouts of tearing groans.

Bloodthirsty.

Not the boy I had seen.

In the rare quiet moments of his metamorphosis, I sat on the floor, in a corner, decidedly starving myself so I could be in mutual pain with him. I stank, I thirsted, I kept my vigil.

I reminisced about Esme Snider.

Before I'd moved on from her surrounds in 1911, I looked in on her. A broad smile swept over my mouth. And that was purity. At her homestead, I followed the scent of field flowers and a girlish titter of laughter to a scoping hill. I sat well back in a tall pine, looking down on her. She had a broom for a crutch padded with what looked like old wash rags. Hobbling in a dance that was both chaste and sensuous, she held the cane as if were a lover. Her hands flittered as if she was stroking her beloved's back and buttocks. She bashfully swiveled her hips and then looked around to make certain no one spied her imprudent waltz.

As before, I felt the gestalt of impulse tear through me… this time-unfettered jealousy. _Who was she dancing with?_ _Touching?_

A lariat of lilac-colored clover offset her freed locks so they tumbled down to her rump. The flowers licked her forehead and fell funnily into her eyes over and over again.

At the end of her spin around the meadow's ballroom, she'd curtsied and fluttered her eyelashes flirtatiously, "A pleasure, Doctor Cullen."

My breath hitched. I snapped a branch sending rooks and squirrels squealing and screeching away.

Esme whipped to face me. _She can't see me, _I'd said the mantra, hoping it was true.

I had to go.

_~~ll~~_

Edward relieved his bladder for the final time and came down from his convulsion. Locked in, he stilled as his heart sped and his tissues bled to charcoal.

The toxin was synthesizing him to athanasia.

Slightly less petrified myself, I hunkered again to the opposite side of the death chamber and caught up on the newspapers I had delivered from near every county I'd resided in. This was my only judicious comfort.

_**Esme Snider Evenson.**_

Her marriage announcement.

It was two months old.

So it was done.

I tore the paper to shreds and stoked a blazing fire in the brazier with it.

Stomping around the room, I didn't quell my footsteps for my invalid; he couldn't hear me anyway.

I pounded the mantle until marble dust fell like snow to the floorboards, and then I stamped on them until the white grains disappeared.

I threw my stethoscope across the room and it crashed through plaster to the unused bedroom beyond.

Laughing hysterically, I folded my forearms on the edge of Edward's blighted bed while he neither moved nor moaned nor blinked in his comatose sleep. I put my head down, shamed by myself.

This was ridiculous! Had I imagined I myself would marry the girl? Had I really thought she could be my wife?

Even Edward, a son, even like this… he was more than I deserved. I'd been selfish to want more.

Too many fairytales.

Caving to the need for some kind of amenity, I left Edward and filled the bathtub. The porcelain swirled with a whirlpool of water, steaming the bathroom. I wiped the chevalier and looked at myself.

I wasn't so old. A droll smile pressed my lips together, _Well, I was, really._

I'd been told I was handsome. At least that much was true.

I wanted too much.

I would have liked to have been able to shave. Or even hear the slosh of my piss hitting the commode.

I wanted to do more than pleasure myself at my own hand.

Cleansed of body if not of soul, I found my charge waking as my unrealized half-hope for Esme extinguished.

Edward was exhumed.

I was shocked at the death I'd caused… gone the greenery of his orbs, to bitumen and bitterness.

It took six months for Edward to become less a savage, incensed beast wanting to puncture the delicate delicacies of every human he smelled.

He was alternately suspicious, spiteful, famished, forlorn.

I never knew a smile to unfold his grim mouth.

I rarely heard words. And when I did he was righteously remorseless after his wild, self-willed silence, "How could you? What gave you the right? You call yourself a healer? You took my _life_!"

Edward was astute as his mother, and he could see the terrific stabbing guilt he splintered inside of me. It was all deserved. His spirit tarnished, his family dead, he was an orphan to a vampire sire.

Worse than his life, I'd stolen his dreams.

Did I have a son, or one more harbinger of the malfeasant brute I was?

His mother's evocative admonition that I should talk more, that Edward would need that of me, made churning rotgut of my coal-like innards. I knew not where to begin as I observed with deadened psyche the torment I alone had wrought upon this young man.

And then there was _Isabella Swan_.

I broke through his forced seclusion, his remote trance, impelling him to hunt with me.

Feline, fast, utterly lion-like, Edward outpaced me. He had grown into his skill as a predator to sup with gentility. Tenderly stroking his kill before glading his teeth to thunderous veins, he took care to calm before murdering our hunted prey.

Replete, we were never satisfied.

Always, this was our bond.

As if the warm blood trickling through him was a skeleton key turning his soul, Edward spoke, speedily, and I imbibed every word as if I'd been sequestered in solitary confinement for thirty decades, which was very nearly the truth.

Recounting his imaginings to me, Edward talked of Isabella Swan. Dream-sprite, myth-woman, she had inhabited his sleep. Through midnight she'd rescued him to the light of day, a liberator to his captive, lonely existence, a boy who understood the remoteness of human nature even inside the loving embrace of his family and few friends.

_I'd stolen his ability to sleep, to dream._ And thus had torn his Isabella from his clutch.

In answer, atonement, I buried myself in research and healing, adhering to the Hippocratic Oath. Letters sailed across the Atlantic to Vladimir and Stefan in Romania. I had Elizabeth's eulogy guiding me, _"Remind him! Make him remember our people, our heritage. Tell him! I was his mother, and his forbears are the Anatolians."_

His exotic mother, who looked so much like him with the allure of her autumn hair and lily-pad eyes, had been a gypsy. And there was a prophecy told of _youth without age and life without death._

Every afternoon, when I came back for lunch, of one sort or another, I recited what I knew of his family so he wouldn't lose his ancestry.

I regaled his mother and her beauty, the moment I'd met them both at the ballet. I told of his father, a staunch, respected Chicagoan businessman. As his perception multiplied, worryingly so, I soothed Edward with the memory of Elizabeth's clairvoyance. A rarity, Edward was one of the few Romany men to know the gift of mind reading.

For once, he smiled, "You're telling me I'm a common fortune teller?"

I laughed over the leaking vein of a deer, "You know, there's always the fair if you're bored, Edward."

He rolled his eyes before gorging himself on a meaty seven-point buck.

The boy did have all the luck.

The first two years were alarming… _what had I done?_ Vestiges of doubt and staunch Protestant guilt seized me, made a sieve of everything I'd formerly believed. Edward doubted his essence, his transcendence. He'd awakened to become sedated and worried he would never know the woman whose love, unreal as it was, had nourished his near-manhood.

I vowed never to turn another.

The epitome of empathy, giving, fortitude, he ultimately forgave me. _How could Edward doubt the existence of his soul? _And the one little gem we both grasped was Isabella Swan. The future of her.

Equally of artistic and empirical mind, Edward devised a novel way to survive the mindless toil of days that never slept. He painted and drew, reams of thick paper and stacks of canvases. All of her.

Turning to the piano, he played the same song over and over, one that his mother had particularly enjoyed; Chopin's _Nocturne._

_Night._

I'd hoped his coming to me would be daylit.

I had been naïve.

Like a son following his father's footsteps, he studied my own workings and turned to medicine. Stating it shored him up against the hunger for civilian blood, Edward kept as busy as myself. Hands at task, we never idled, but for Sunday afternoons. A bit nontraditional in our weekend best, stalking dinner together and then returning home to a lit fire on the open hearth, music on the gramophone and newspapers and opened books and sheets of music littering the parlor floor.

A near restful peace enveloped us. I was honored by Edward's growing respect and admiration, replacing his hurt and mute rebuke.

_Dawn._

My indulgence, found in folded stacks of newsprint from distant cities, the editorials, the crime reports, the ephemera of local life, I regularly perused–too much time on my hands. I did rejoice at the succinct notice of Wolfram Snider's death in 1918. The obituary was small, just like he had been, and merely stated the cause of death by farming accident.

_Good._

We moved to Wisconsin. On the outskirts of Milwaukee.

Even together, as father and son, we were still lonely.

Him to his piano, painting and studies. Me to my research, vampire lore, and patients.

Platitudes.

Solitude.

One evening, we strolled down Wells Street and rounded the corner of Water.

Turner Hall, with the dance rooms, was alive with music and thumping with people. More staid, Edward and I had been to the theater. It was only February and still cold as Canada, but a young woman burst through the doors without even a wrap to her shoulders and cursed lightly at the snag in her silk stockings, "_Schiesse!_"

We were dressed in our finest, she was just as showy.

Across the pavement, the woman saw us and tried to hide into a blackened corner.

As if we couldn't see her.

I'd stopped walking, and Edward was a few paces ahead before he turned on his heel.

Tantalizing tobacco smoke flicked up, illuminating a heart-shaped face.

I held one hand out to Edward, to stall him, and one to the woman to cajole her to me.

She steadied herself against the block wall and lifted one foot to peel a leaflet from the sole of her heels.

Juggling the cigarette, trying to keep her balance, her round belly rose like the sun into the light of the harp-luminaire.

The hand I offered curled back and crushed over wanting.

She fanned herself with the flyer.

She rubbed her womb. Pregnant, robust, her slim form had blossomed to house a baby.

She put out the sweet, smoky cigarette and made sure her stockings were adequately fastened, hastily raising her skirts.

It was the most erotic thing I'd ever seen.

Checking the ribbons of her garters, she lifted her leg and inspected the laddered seam.

A firm, curved calf licked light.

I closed my eyes against the jagged scar still so angry from her knee to ankle.

_Esme._

I said her name silently, and Edward heard me.

He hissed and worried me away from the gorgeous, grown-up dame, "Carlisle!"

I looked back. She was watching.

"Not now, Carlisle," Edward intoned.

In the immutable days following I had to remember she was married, she was with child.

Esme was here, but she would never be mine, and that was that.

A secretive smirk smocked Edward's mouth as he regarded my inability to concentrate on my volumes or music or newspapers.

"What?" I demanded. "I'm your father, Edward. You know I could reprimand you."

At that he simply rolled off the settee and floundered around the floor in full-on mirth.

I didn't let him see my smile as I passed over his prone form to my study.

_My child._

_~~ll~~_

I strolled by a young lady often on my walk to the hospital. A blissful smile curled her lips, fresh blossoms of an autumn bloom in her beatific face. She cradled her pregnant belly with both hands, holding it up, circling her palms over the full nascent round.

It was Esme.

I didn't know if she remembered me.

I quivered and quailed and had no idea how to do this.

She wore no ring.

She always greeted me with a trill laugh warbling her voice and a nod, "Good morning, Doctor."

"How do, Miss."

I didn't think she recognized me; anyone would address me as doctor with the accoutrements I wore.

As the nights grew darker, I followed at a pace, unnoticed, from the school at which she taught to her house. Only to safeguard her from fantastical gargoyles such as myself.

The mere presence of Edward, one of my own, was enough to ease the solid void, the diaphanous unnamed ache in my cavernous chest.

_Nearly._

His companionship made my long, long life less stultifying. Still there was no wife, no mother, no feminine charms, and I'd never had a mate.

One morning, the pale blue sky crisp and clear and bright as her eyes, I came upon the woman seated on a bench. Gasping, she rubbed her fingers to her womb and laughed at my rushed inquiry for I couldn't withhold her name an instant longer, "Esme, are you alright?"

Sibilantly she told me in double talk she knew me, she recollected, "Pied Piper."

In that rushed conversation we acknowledged our former meeting in Ohio.

I couldn't have her. Though I'd wanted to protect her from her aberrant father ten years ago, now I wanted her… _as a lover?_

Such pipe dreams.

But I'd be remiss on passing by her not to nod my head and inquire after her health.

I gave her two oranges and hoped I wasn't staring at her lips, "One for you and one for the babe. May I?" My hand quivered and a bronze-red leaf, like Edward's fall hair, flattened to the pavement at my feet close to where I sat.

"Yes, Doctor. The wee one gets a bit active on such lovely days. Her little foot is pressing out just a bit too hard, and I had to sit down for a moment." Her voice shone like her glowing visage, rapturously of the heavens.

A mother's love.

She grabbed my wrist unceremoniously and pulled it to her tum that was tight as a drum over a living little being inside. A sharp point lunged out into my palm, and I laughed at the feel! She caught her breath, then my other hand, placing it higher and to her right, just beneath the full globes of her breasts where the dome of a heel kicked out.

"Oh!" I exclaimed, I'd never felt anything like this.

"I know, she's a wild little being!" The plush apples of her cheeks glossed with love so brilliantly I wanted to weep.

"She?"

"A mother knows these things," and her smile folded into a secret maternal turn of mouth.

The next morning we were quiet as we sat upon the bench. There needed be no words. _Do you know?_

Esme ran her hands over my forearms, "Yes. I know. I remember." Up to my hair her fingers dallied, "You haven't aged a bit, Pied Piper."

This felt like promise.

Ten days passed. I still felt the beat of a new being housed in her mother's womb shifting into my palm.

I thought of little else.

I didn't see the mother-to-be again in all that time.

In my study, contemplating the fragile gift of humanity, worrying about Esme, Edward interrupted me. Looking harried, wrapped tight inside of thoughts that had spun from me to him and beyond, he demanded, "You must go to the hospital now, Carlisle."

Unquestioningly I grabbed my black leather bag, left off my coat and ran through back grounds to my calling.

I understood he couldn't, at times, stop himself from peering into my mind.

Edward knew something.

Inside the casualty room so highly lit I blinked and wheeled about, I saw the gurney.

She was near-dead. Her spine fragmented into a million irreparable pieces, like shattered glass jigsawing into the surrounding tissues.

Even her father couldn't have caused such catastrophe.

It was her, the schoolmistress. Esme.

No longer was there a garden of ripe flowers inhabiting her flesh.

No longer was there a fertile hill copiously filling her belly.

Her womb was empty. Recently. The flesh of her stomach loose and supple.

Her face was cold and blue and dying.

Running to the files, swerving away from lingering nurses and gabbing doctors, I grabbed her chart. Esme Snider. The surname of good Midwestern German stock. Of course I'd known it all along.

A birth certificate. A bairn. The girl she'd promised was born not a week before. Two days after I'd sat with her outside her school.

Annaliese Carolla Snider.

Slipping through the tissue-thin papers, the final sheet flittered to the floor, a breeze wafted it a few feet away from me. Even from this distance I knew what it was.

A death certificate.

_Morning._

Mourning.

I fell to my knees.

She'd tossed herself off Ashland Cliff.

All her flirtation and courageousness was gone.

Flittered away.

_Could I have saved her, back then?_

_How could she live without her baby?_

She couldn't. It was just as easy as that.

Women lived and died for their children.

Here was the evidence again.

Evinced with the facts, I rubbed my face and saw the seesaw of her breasts assaying breath in and out, ever more slowly.

_I'd promised never to take another._

I beat the tiled floor, scrubbed my palms into the grout, rasped my nails to the cracks.

With her heart still beating, _only just_, I signed Esme's death note, wheeled her to the morgue, lifted her as tenderly as possible while her broken back disjointed with the crunch of over-glazed ceramic about my arms.

Through the night, to my house, to Edward, I ran softly, pouncing brittle cold dirt, shouldering aside the branches of evergreens, taking to the woods.

He had known; he'd sent me for a reason.

Skilled as a medical student himself, Edward had readied my library, making it the mortuary that had seen him risen, like a lonely Lazarus.

I tried to make it better for Esme.

The second time round was just as appalling as the first.

No one had strength enough to beat back the flames corroding marrow to carbon.

_No one._

Coming to, eyes fiery and irate, skin crawling never to know the cradling suckling of an infant, Esme was a wild Fury.

Heating water so it felt like witches' torches to my fingers, I filled the bath and wrestled Esme into it. She was rigid and near-crazed and half-catatonic. Stilling her, wrapping her in heated liquid and lavender fragrances, I managed to soothe her enough to wash her of blood, death, rebirth, afterbirth. Her honeyed, gilded hair a simple bob to her shoulders turned to dark ingots under the water, and she choked gasps of air as if she thought I would drown her.

She didn't understand breath was now a luxury.

Against my eyes of amber, the lividity of hers finally registered.

Acceptance and recollection.

She spluttered out and crawled back when she heard her new tonality, "You!" She clawed at the slick edges of the tub to sit up, and the speed of her movements silenced all but the slosh of water to the floor for just half a moment. "You? Doctor Cullen?"

I nodded and begged her to be… _unharmed._

"No, no no no!" Her wet, slick, naked body now perched on the ledge, and her hands grappled with the window seeking escape.

I cooled her anger with a stroke over her cheek, a virtuous slide down her arms to lift her fingers away from the tongue and groove of metal hasp that held the casement tightly closed.

Her brow bunched and she was naked and gorgeous and so very hurt, hunted, haunted, and finally understanding, "Pied Piper."

I nodded.

"You set my leg."

I longed to touch that length.

"My father never broke another bone."

For that I was thankful.

Her breasts were covered in chills, lifting her nipples.

I looked away.

The bath had cooled.

I let out the water.

She began to cry, grievously, "Where's my baby?" Her hands touched the emptiness of her belly.

I cared not that she was bare, I gathered her to me and swathed her in a towel, caressing her hair as I cried with her, "I'm so sorry, Esme. She died."

I felt all her newborn sinews bundle, she sniffed against my chest, "I still feel her inside. I can hear her cries. My breasts," she sat away and looked down and worried her nipples no longer dripped with colostrum. Cupping the mounds, she motioned, "It's all gone."

Her quiescence was like a cortege.

I covered her and took her to a sumptuous bed and lay with her, as a friend.

Brushing her hair and fanning it to the pillows I began to explain, "You've always known what I am."

Curtly, she said, "Yes," against my hugging biceps.

"I had to save you, Esme."

Giving way, she rolled to me, "I always thought of you, Carlisle."

Her eyes glittered like a glass of rich, red wine and groaned, "I'm so hungry."

_Of course._

Disarmed by her nudity, I looked aside and attended her thirst. Flight or tolerance.

I expected revenge, not respite…I didn't deserve this.

She complied and allowed me to feed her from a small red fox.

Little more could I accomplish that night.

And not for many more.

After her first bath, only a fortnight of sickening bewilderment needled like flames throughout our house.

I made to sleep with her every night; human impulses so difficult to ignore.

We didn't slumber, we rarely spoke.

We held each other. Not naked as the first night.

She came to much more readily than Edward. Perhaps it was her more matured age. Perhaps it was the merciless search for any death to end her life.

We made a small monument to Annaliese–a pieta. I could never give her a child; I thought I should feel like Esme's father. Yet I'd known the touch of her baby and felt it to have been the kick of my own were human rights and rites of passages I wanted to bestow upon her, but I was either unable to, or I disallowed myself crossing the scant boundary that held us apart.

Esme wouldn't let me cross myself again.

Every morning, she coddled me, "You cured me."

I denied her persistence.

How could I tell her I'd though of her for ten years and little else? How could I admit I didn't know how to love as a mate? How could I make it clear I wanted her so very much it hurt my body, my groin, my growing cock to reside beside her night after night only to try to hang onto my bedside manner?

I stopped bedding down with her.

I went back to my own austere chambers.

She took it as an insult and Edward tsked me. He just had to look at me, and I understood his thoughts, _"Hopeless."_

I would have liked to kiss her. To feel the weight of her breasts in my hands and her nipples pebbling under my thumbs. I wanted to part her legs and suckle the pink flesh inside.

I was becoming a satyr in my secret passion for Esme.

She had only to brush up against me in the garden and my loins hardened until I couldn't move or speak.

There was one thing. For both of them. A son in Edward to Esme. And a mother unto him.

For myself, I continued to hold apart.

They doted upon each other, dociled to the battles that engorged them…to kill and to love.

I rankled and festered and feared I would never know a mate. Her presence made my lack of connubial caresses ever more pronounced.

Edward began to compose.

Esme wondered about teaching again.

I counseled myself against desire for that I should not want.

_Midday._

A semblance of peace sank over us, soft like cloth.

Only it was more like horsehair to me, making my erection rear with her nearness.

Wryly smiling, Edward hooked his eyebrow, "You have to woo her, Carlisle."

I spat back at him, mutely, "And what would you know of courtship, _Son_?"

He muttered, "Apparently more than you, _Father_."

_He was right._

I found a copy of _The Pied Piper of Hamelin._ Esme spoke of it often as the work she'd read and memorized and imagined to be personification of me and our odd family.

There was music on the gramophone, a fire in the grate. We lounged about the parlor. Tension was thick as an August morning. From the wing-backed chair I strode to Esme and presented her with my gift.

In her excitement she shot through the paper, throwing it to the air like ticker-tape. As soon as the book was denuded, she stopped. A statue, like Aphrodite, she bowed over the volume and ran her fingers across the cover and then against the lips that aroused me.

Still looking down, she offered her hand and pulled me to her side. She didn't meet my eyes, but clutched my shirt, mouthed my neck, whispered against my ear, "Thank you, my love."

I embraced her, but made sure she was far enough away from the hardness harnessed in my trousers.

Edward left the room. The soul of discretion.

I was roused from our cuddle by her feet finding home at my crotch.

Shooting up like a firework, I shuffled my feet and stammered, "I… uh…" _damn_. "I'll just be upstairs."

Edward glowered at me from his doorway as I passed.

I knuckled his skull and grappled with him amiably, "Leave it."

Weeks to months found Esme regarding me like the woman she'd wanted to be…seasoned and burgeoning. Coquettish, even flirtatious.

But how was this thing suitable?

She was older than I by human standards. A fact my burrowing mind found amusing. It was an existential conundrum.

The swish of her hips, the shine of her eyes, the startling femininity I had done so long without. Her breast so high and round, every curve perfectly erogenous and soft and willing me closer.

I bit my lips and frowned and foraged deeper to work and reading and counseling my young ones.

I still saw her breasts from that first bath and felt her heel pressing against my cock.

My imprudent thoughts worried me, debased me through their ungodliness. Esme would be my daughter! I'd saved her, sired her, made her one of my own. A tetragrammaton, her name was too sacred to be spoken, too precious to be defiled, all I should do was worship from afar.

But she looked at me with such hunger, quietly bold on those evenings when Edward was out.

Her skirt lifted just a bit as she sat with legs coiled upon the sofa. Kicking off her heels, sifting her calves together so I could hear the rasp of silk hosiery.

One button undone at her neck and a hand lifting out the liquidity of her champagne strands.

Oftentimes I excused myself to lie awake in my bed or pretend to read in my library. Though I could rarely concentrate anymore and sleep was almost three centuries forgotten.

Over my desire and her singing call, there was the knowledge of her husband. Charles Evenson. The man who had wasted the honorific heart of human Esme! The coward who'd debased her, had hurt her, had plied her with a brutal mockery of intimacy.

Every night, for five more months, Esme watched me keenly.

I didn't know what to do.

It was unfathomable that she was willing to bed me, with her history.

I overheard her chatting with Edward one night as if he was a girlfriend and not a supernatural immortal with oracular prescience, "I don't think he fancies me."

"He's just worried, Esme."

"He already made me a vampire, what else has he to fear?"

"You've been hurt before."

"Oh no," she gasped. "_Oh no!_ Carlisle could never compare himself to Wolfram or Charles. I waited my entire life for him." She started to giggle a bit, and Edward laughed. I tried not to grin at the devastating hilarity–_she'd had to die for me to come to her._ Twisted in their humor, the both of them.

Edward counseled, "Give him time."

I snuck outside and went on my rounds with their words whirligigging about my head.

There was no way she and I could be a simple tryst.

It would be more than that.

My hands shook with greed at the thought.

The beginning of her second year with us, Esme came to me. Her silky robe was a dash of flowers knotted close, but only just, at her waist.

The hills of her breasts stood out, and one leg reached through the satin drapes.

Sternly, ignoring the motley crew of hormones that had me sitting upright and closer to my desk, lest she cotton on to my growing erection, I asked, "Yes, Esme?"

"Bathe me, like you used to, Carlisle," she breathily requested. Pivoting away, she tapped down the long hall to the bathroom, and I heard the jets of water filling the luxurious tub she'd had installed.

Standing, my knees cracked into an open drawer, and I swore. Esme giggled from two rooms over at my subtle expletive.

I knocked on the door and only opened it to her call, "Yes, Carlisle. I'm adequately covered."

Entering to dewdrops of heat and pillows of warmth that evaporated the air, I looked to the floor. Shucking off my loafers and socks, I tucked my toes into the hook of the thick bath cloth.

Sitting to the side of the tub, I remembered how I had washed and rinsed her locks. How I'd run a washcloth over her plush curves, wanting to ease the hissing insanity I'd cursed her with.

Now she beckoned me.

I used to look at her as no more than a savior.

Now I wanted to savor the wet slope of her body beneath water.

Then I'd dried her, wrapped her up, rubbed drip-drops from her hair and brushed it.

All these fraught, frightening, alone years, an untouched man.

I sank my hands through the foam of bubbles and felt her hips.

My first sensual contact in the centuries that had sat like a glacier over my being.

No lower, no higher, I simply thrilled to the touch of her bare skin, as a lover, inside my palms.

"What do you want, Esme? If you could have anything, what would it be?" I hated to ask, quite simply understanding, with the pain of newborn death upon me again, she would answer with something I could not give. For her humanity I'd taken away.

Turning just right and lowering so my fingers found purchase over her watery breasts and sat to her engorged, drowned nipples, Esme's low voice was faint but sure, "I want this family, Carlisle. I want only what I have. And one thing more."

"_More?_" I gasped and pulled her peaks up between my thumb and palm.

Against my mouth, into the nook at the side, she licked, "I want you to look at me as a man does a woman."

I kissed her with every torturous friendless year, one hand still gripping and twisting her warmed, dusky peak and the other inside her hair, over her head, "I could never see you as anything but a woman, Esme."

Stealing away but holding my hands in place, Esme taunted, "Good. Then there's just _one thing more_ I want, Carlisle."

I held my breath and waited. She sat up out of the water upon her knees so I was faced with her fabulously beautiful, blushing breasts. I pushed them together until her nipples joined and grinned to her sigh-sway-gasp, "I want you to join me in this bath."

I smattered smiles into her cleavage and stood.

Releasing my pants, opening and dropping my shirt to the floor, I lifted myself into the tub, unsettling water with my large frame.

"Like this?" I asked while I leaned back and pulled Esme to my lap.

This came far more easily than I'd thought.

"Yes!" Her head craned away, her back reached out like a billowing sail at sea. Her thighs upon mine were feathery. Her soft reaches sank to me, and I was inside of her.

I smiled and sucked a nipple to my lips.

I groaned and lifted my hips so my cock sank like a mast, timber to the waves of her secret hold.

Her arms rested on the rim of the tub, Esme's hair dangled in the water she was so far bent back over me, I jerked her hips harder than I'd ever imagined. The slap of wavelets were nothing to the feisty fire of our fucking.

Upright, I brought her to my chest and melted when her hands ran all over me, and down to our joining. Curling her fingers, she circled my shaft that lifted in and out, clinching as tight as her insides!

I moved just once more, to raise her legs up my torso, her ankles to my ribs. The bath was emptying all over the floor and we laughed, moaned, _groaned_.

Her round bottom sat upon my thighs and rained like peaches over my sac.

Inside of Esme, I'd never felt heat, tight, sucking, hard-soft love like this.

_Never._

She bit her lip, and I tugged it out of her teeth.

She bit my finger and I howled and wanted more.

She kissed my mouth and sucked my tongue and trounced my cock.

A fist in her hair, a grip on her hip.

A dip, lunge, swirl.

Holding tight, fighting breath.

We were done.

Undone.

Collapsing.

Unfolding.

The water cooled to the ice of our love making.

I did as I always had. _Always would._

At the vanity, I folded Esme in towels. Ran my fingers first through her hair, and then with the silver-backed brush.

This time though, I picked her up, her legs wound 'round my bare, lean waist. And I carried her to my bed.

_Evensong._

I had mine.

_Finally._

We didn't sleep, but we slumbered nonetheless.

Elizabeth Masen's words came back to me, _"There's more. She'll save you. She'll save you again."_

I'd always thought she'd meant Isabella Swan for Edward.

Now I wondered.

Had she been talking about Esme?

As if a seer herself, Esme asked with her fingers filtering up and down my chest, making me need her again as the sexual smoothness of her legs glided between mine, lowly, wantonly, her voice echoed her purchase on top of me as she brought my cock inside her channel again…I was so ready for her. I steadied her and kissed across her collarbone, down to her pendulous breasts. Pushing up with my hips, I barely heard her, "How long will Edward have to wait," her hips swiveled, slowly, "for his?"

* * *

~~ I hope there were enough sweet, light-hearted moments amidst the angst to make you smile. Review?~~

My o/s _Jealousy_ was recently on The Fictionators (ta windycitywonder)!

(AT)Kstew411 recced the Hell out of _Dead Confederates _at Rob My World!

I had a fantastic time writing an o/s with Viola: _Mt. St. Hellena High School._

_Rebelward Without a Cause _and_ Dead Confederates _next_._

Obviously everything is linked on my profile if you're interested, in addition to some cool new DC's artwork.

Very many thanks for the reviews, tweets, comments, etc. for all my stories…y'all make me such a happy little southerner!

Rie~


	7. Sky

My love to Viola Cornuta; this story (as with all my others) is so much richer for her input. My heart to Vanessarae, my work is actually pretty, and readable, and error free with her assistance!

Disclaimer: This particular story is mine; the characters and premise are not.

Thanks to dragonflyidt for her help with Romanian lore, language and customs!

The biggest love to all my ladies at the DW—thanks so much for your craziness, y'all actually make me feel normal ;).

The italicized parts are from _Youth without Age and Life without Death_ for the most part.

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Seven: Sky**

**Edward Cullen**

_After three days had passed, the prince prepared to continue his journey and departed. He rode on, and on, and on; the road seemed to grow longer and longer, but when he had finally crossed the frontiers of the Woodpecker Fairy's kingdom, he entered a beautiful meadow, one side of which was covered with blooming plants, but the other was scorched.  
_

_The prince asked why the grass was singed, and the horse answered:  
_

_"We are now in the domain of the Scorpion Witch; she is the Woodpecker Fairy's sister, but they are both so wicked that they can't live together. Their parents' curse has fallen upon them, and so, as you see, they have become monsters; their enmity goes beyond all bounds; they are always trying to get possession of each other's lands. When this one is very angry she spits fire and pitch; she must have had some quarrel with her sister, and, to drive her out of her kingdom, has burned the grass on which she was standing. She is even worse than her sister, and has three heads. We will rest awhile now, and be ready at the first peep of dawn to-morrow."_

When I awoke, I fully expected to see the sky outside the gable window of my bedroom. I should have known better when there was no lasting impression of my nightly visitor inside the safe-keeping of my mind.

There was no sky, only windows covered by heavy velvet curtains pulled-to, denying the sun's entrance to the dark, paneled, study-made-hospital room. My first ragged breath found fire bursting down my throat and around my chest that felt hollow as an empty grave before trailing ashen, incinerating heat to my stomach.

No sky, just conflagration. And the murmur of a deep, masculine voice. Through wieldy eyes I saw him. In a flash that rivaled the hunger-suck of inflammation that caused a noise like a growl to climb from my cavernous body, I remembered.

My life was instantly dismembered.

_Dream Killer._

A word came unbidden, tasting both unfamiliar and nostalgic: _Strigoi._

Undead spirit.

The man from Swan Lake, the doctor from the ward, the creature who had delivered news of my mother and father's deaths with one hand and divested me of life with the incising scalpel of his teeth.

Again, a faint feminine voice whispered inside my mind, _binefăcător_

Drowning his words of explanation were my own dry sobs, my eyes parched.

Aghast, I looked to my hands that had been wrapped over my face.

"You can no longer cry, Edward."

I raged, and the howls from my body ripped an insane hunger through me, awakening lust for something I didn't understand beyond knowing _it_ needed sating now!

A heavy gold ring circled the smallest finger on my right hand; its heft was novel. The metal had cooled against my skin until what looked like a skein of frost crackled over it.

Coding me.

Ranging from the crisping cinders inside my throat to the circlet on my pinkie, to the inhuman creature before me, my thoughts flittered and flew, yet every unraveling thread was discernible and easily tracked. Above it all was the Strigoi's condemnable apologies and then a rasping, smoky, old woman's voice and a vision that could have been memory, or it could have been hallucination.

_Her face, what little I could see through the folding tapestry fabric she wore__over her head, was swarthy and wrinkled like rawhide, and in her hands she held an egg. The fragile oval snugged down to the furrows of her skin when she gently juggled it back and forth. _

_Chanting a rusty rhythm, the old dame broke the egg's shell with a crack to an enamel bowl and let the insides dollop out. The superiority of her expression changed to one of fear. Holding the cup towards me, I saw the runny, opaque white tinged with yarns of red, of pink, of blood._

_And no yoke._

_A curse._

_Another voice, the younger one, the one that smacked me with heartbreaking homesickness replied, and in her tone she held hope, "There is a cure, __băiatul meu__**."**_

And his voice, The Voice, flooded out the two others, intoning, over and over again, "Please be well, I'm sorry, please be well. I promised you'd come to no harm, that you'd live."

This was meant to be life?

I felt like I was _dying_.

I tried to rip my neck to shreds to rid myself of the insatiable craving.

"You need blood, Edward."

My fight diminished, I nodded weakly. In my wary state, I thought he meant a transfusion of sorts.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

"Stay here, please, until I return."

I acquiesced. Remaining in that room, I turned to stone. My eyes didn't blink, my lungs didn't fill, my fingers didn't twitch, my legs never moved.

Catatonic.

The door opened and only my eyes lifted.

Then widened with distress!

The doctor cradled a doe in each arm as if they weighed no more than newborn babes. Jumping off the makeshift gurney in distaste, I almost knocked him over in my haste until the scent of iron, warm and rich, invaded the room to throw a heady spell over me.

Grabbing the minky-skinned animals from his hands, I hunkered in the corner and sniffed at the creatures quizzically, my hunger exploding.

I reached in with fingers shaped like talons, pulling tendons and sinews to the side. Slick mucous and tissue didn't daunt me. I found the dying thump of a fat artery, milky violet inside its cloudy casing. Putting my nose flush to it, I inhaled the wet, bitter smell and licked once before pointing my tongue like a dagger, stabbing into the vein. Moaning, I wrapped my lips around the pulsing carotid and sucked until my cheeks caved in, and blood spilled its warmth over my chin and throat and torso.

I wasted no time with the second deer. I simply cracked her neck like a wishbone, meaty marrow spattered the bookcase beside me and violent plops of tissue showered up to my hair, caking my cheeks, making my hands reek.

I drew the dense, warm liquid into my throat as fast as I could until I'd pulled an entire length of emptied vein from the eviscerated carcass with my earnestness.

Hunched over, I shoved the dead cadavers away; the racing force of their bodies shattered the far wall, carving a dent into the skirting.

My hands were bloodied, and I put them in my hair, deepening the paler red there.

Rocking, shaking, I was on the balls of my feet, my elbows to my knees, trying to make myself as small as possible. An insect. A rat.

"You need blood to survive, Edward."

The voice continued as if I had not just massacred two innocent deer in his library.

Matter of fact, he stated, "You're strong. Supernaturally strong now."

I glanced at the impact the deer had made on plaster with barely a push from my arms.

The voice crouched before me and made as if to touch me, but I shrank back with a feral growl.

"Like me, you're immortal."

Sitting down and crossing his legs, in it for the long haul, the voice lowered and sounded suffering, "You're mother wanted this, Edward. She knew what I was."

I raised my eyes, clenched my fists, _how dare he speak of my mother!_

"Speed, strength, beauty, grace, and unending life to be fed only by blood…we're vampires, Edward."

Gasping, I saw utter blackness when I closed my eyes, wishing for unconsciousness.

"One more thing," the voice whispered, haunted of tone. "You'll never sleep again."

I scrunched my eyes tight, rolled over to a ball, begged for tears, continued to breathe. _You'll never sleep again._ This declaration above all the others ruined me! To not sleep meant not to dream of Isabella Swan.

Tearing through his house like a wild beast, I clawed furniture apart, shredding books, breaking every damn piece of china because it mocked me with the fact I'd never have need for it again.

I laughed maniacally.

Everything he'd said was true.

The blood, the stamina, the power, the insomnia, the neglect of oxygen.

_All of it was true._

Accepting his offerings of freshly killed animals, I devoured the carrion.

I was a beast; I didn't even speak to him. Not for six months.

Hearing his thoughts made me want to rip my ears off though; I imagined with my vigor I could probably do just that if I really had mind to. Anxious and worried, _the voice's_ guilt was insidious, scrabbling through him from the inside out.

At first I enjoyed his affliction as it befitted a murderer.

Not only had he stolen my life, he'd erased the memories of my mother and father. As if he'd taken cloth to the markings on a blackboard, he's made the faces of my parents watery, warped as though rippled upon the surface of Lake Michigan.

All of my human years sped away so quickly.

Yet every minute here marched at a tortoise's pace.

The one visage remaining true and clear and bright, at least at first, was Isabella Swan, as though she was linked to me in this existence as well as that of my mortal years.

I could only hope while I stormed and razed and hated.

Crawling like nothing more than a mongrel towards a piece of heavy linen paper floating in ever widening spirals to the trunched up rug, dis-housed from his portfolio after my latest rampage, I scoured the refuse for a pen. Isabella had abounded in my dreams, as a human. I had those no more. She was fading too. Furiously unleashed, I sketched her face and form, black to white so she was living in front of me in less than a minute.

Finding another and another page, I traded pen for carbon and began to take my time, shading in her almond eyes, pointing out the scatter of pale freckles atop her cheeks and straight nose. In chiaroscuro, I told of her little widow's peak, the feminine dimple in her chin, the arch of her eyebrows and the height of her brow. Pressing hard and lifting up, I recreated her wavy brown hair, loosened from its hold, as I remembered it wafting over my arms. A cameo at the neck of her high ruffled blouse, slim shoulders lifting in query, eyes dancing in forthrightness, the rounds of her earring studs twinkling of precious metal.

Bent over the drawing, I revered her, placed my palm to her face.

He found me there, on the floor with scattered drawings all around.

I shut out his thoughts and listened to his voice, "This is Isabella Swan?"

A fresh startle lifted out my words, sounding unused and unduly irate, "How do you know her?"

He leaned away, sat to a chair, pulled it close, elbows to knees as I'd been before him, cagey in front of the savage animal who finally spoke, "When you died, _when I took your life, Edward,_ for a moment your mind opened to me. I heard her name; I know you saw her at that last instant. Who is she?"

I observed his genteel stature, his obeisant posture, hands open, eyes honest. I looked down to the young woman and told her secret for the first time, "I knew her in my sleep alone."

With dread and sadness, what was once green and now complete tones of golden yellow saw the ache in his echoing eyes, "For everything, I'm sorry, Edward."

Stooping, he patted my shoulder, the only awkwardness in the motion from the fact that he wanted to embrace me. Standing, he left me to my work, closing the door, granting me privacy.

Acceptance then was to be mine, after half a year that felt like a damned eternity.

The voice had a name, and one I'd been familiar with secondhand; Doctor Carlisle Cullen. The voice, Carlisle, possessed a kindness of spirit that would never replace the humanity I vaguely remembered, but that affected me, finally, nonetheless.

With surety, proficiency, and grace, Carlisle guided me as a sire into this new world. Steeped in confidence, innate paternal instincts, a warmth of nature that his frigidity would never eclipse, he fathered me as a young man to be respected and reared carefully.

He was hospitable; he made his house my own. Through my berserking, he'd said not one word, but merely, nightly, cleaned up after me.

He'd placed my father's, Edward John's, ring on me while I was _turning._ That was an innocuous way to describe the dammed hell on earth that had razed my skeleton clean of mortal flesh.

He'd hoped the emblem would tie me to my past and my parents into this inglorious hereafter.

A keeper of life even while he dealt death, Carlisle had written down everything he knew of my family, had saved their medical records and all the living scraps of them that couldn't be buried with their souls.

I rather think Carlisle had even broken a few laws to gather such memoirs.

Along with my father's signet, I wore, newly, my mother's engagement ring on a long chain about my neck. The faceted, pear colored diamond was the light-spilling green of her eyes I could _almost_ remember.

He told me I was a rare commodity; a male Romany seer… a fortune teller, following in Eliza's footsteps.

He assured me I had both their spirits still alive inside me.

He joked and advised I could join the fairs if I was bored and looking for livelihood.

He became serious, somber, not relishing the fact that many of my Anatolian ancestors were still wildening about this country from stomping ground to midway and I'd never be able to see them again.

And worse, my own grandmother, Louise Harriet Masen, abided not ten miles from us.

There were Eastman snapshots and notes and housekeeping lists, recipe cards for Romanian meals I'd never touch or taste again.

We sat at opposite sides of the parlor, I the student of my own life.

And I forgave Carlisle.

And I forgave my mother.

And I still, always, _forever,_ looked for Isabella Swan, and closed my eyes and pleaded for sleep and curled into a pained ball of nothing but voided body when she wouldn't come to me, couldn't come to me, would never look upon me… again.

Sifting through the photographs, I came across one of me and two young men. Our arms were loosely hanging about each other's shoulders. I looked… at ease. The other two were caught mid-jest, their mouths wide and grinning. One bulkier and taller than me and dark of hair, the other my height and blond and with a wide gap in his teeth though the structure of his face made an overall handsome picture.

Quickly, feeding off a current of recognition, I turned the papery frail image. On the back, scrawled in lead in my own penmanship: _Me, Whit, Carty. 1915._

I folded it and placed it in my notecase**.**

Then, there was the Romanian folk story. _Youth without Age and Life without Death._ My new father, my brother, my friend, my liege mentioned often how Eliza had prophesied, "_Taci, fiul meu, si i'll-ti dea tinerilor fara virsta si viata fara moarte. _Be quiet, my son, and I'll give you youth without age and life without death_._"

This legend had convinced Carlisle to grant me death, and reviling rebirth.

We spent many hours spilling over that tale.

It got me no closer to Isabella, no closer to understanding what I was meant to do here.

Live?

I'd done that.

Die?

I'd done that as well.

Make love, mate, love, give, feel, _feel?_

I was still waiting.

Learned and nurturing, Carlisle was patience itself. But never was he a mother, never could he be the woman I longed for.

To be completely crude, I wanted all those things I'd had as a human man: to drink a glass of beer, take a piss, shave my chin and cheeks.

There were the bits and pieces I'd never had a chance at: flirting, dancing, courting, kissing.

One weekend evening in early January 1920, Carlisle threw his broadsheet at me and licked the print off his fingertips, "Shoes on, boy. Let's get out of here for a change. The Volstead Act will be effected in a few days, we might as well hit the local before prohibition closes its doors."

I looked at him quizzically; we'd never so much as stepped foot inside Steinmetz Saloon.

At the tavern so thick with cigar and cigarette smoke, I nearly choked, I was absolutely shocked to sidle up to the bar next to Carlisle while he ordered two glasses of Monarch beer.

We sat on stools and nodded at the regulars and made small talk… I followed his lead, as I usually did. Carlisle showed me how to drain the tankards, "I need to use the john, boy," and off he went to the stalls to get rid of the alcohol.

He grinned, I smirked; we had them bamboozled.

When he returned, he found me at the billiards table with a stack of bucks right by my hand.

A crowd had formed, and I pulled them in, finding some other piece of myself, liberated, "Come on, now, you good folks think I can take this Jonathan Jenks for his whole money clip?"

Money changed hands _almost_ faster than I could count, and Carlisle smiled through his silent warning, _"Well, that's not exactly _fair_, Edward, is it? Seeing as you do."_

He was right, but he didn't stop me, and I couldn't help myself, because I felt like a person.

The pile of dollars at the end of the night toppled to the floor and stuck to the dried, sloshed lager.

I counted each note into the bartender's hands and proclaimed, "Close out the night, my man."

We left feeling lighter with shouts and cheers at our backs.

_~~II~~_

I studied after him. Painting and sketching filled in the non-stop time. There was friendship and fostering and care. And always I looked to Isabella to find me.

Promising to never change another, Carlisle walked about bearing the rash of my eternal vampire life like a thorn crown on his blond head and ironnails through his palms and feet.

The culpability within him only lightening with our every conspiring on Isabella or our increasing nights on the town to play and theater, as well as to the speakeasy or public lecture.

His disavowal to bring any other into our world was pure, but it was in the workings of the universe itself; no one, not man nor beast, could cease this motion once put in place.

I could only help it along.

In Milwaukee, 1921, _his woman_ was here. On our way home from a play, we chanced across TurnerHall**. **The scent of singular cigarette smoke smelted the air and reminded me, reminded me, _reminded me of Eliza?_ I pivoted toward the source and followed the gray skein down through air to a young woman, her belly huge with child, her body bearing up against the doorway of the dance hall.

While I tried to fathom her thoughts, this soon-to-be mother, Carlisle hissed and gasped and took off over the road with not a second thought, _"Esme."_ The purest smile played his mouth up as he closed the distance, only to be halted by my whisper, "Carlisle, not now! Not yet!"

He looked to me with a black glare. Torn. Because this was the woman he'd always thought about, although he'd never spoken of her.

Esme Elise Snider.

_In the flesh._

From pubescent patient to full womanhood. And here, right now.

They'd been linked from her sixteenthyear, in Ohio, when he'd set her leg. I'd seen it all.

Carlisle had never stopped thinking about her.

Wishing, just as I did, to be human, and to find his woman, unharmed and real.

The entire walk home, he tried to inveigle me to turn back, as if it was only an idea, one of our new outings and not in search of the pregnant woman who racked his soul.

As if I couldn't read his mind.

_This wasn't their time, not yet. _If I could never find Isabella, the least I could do was make his road to Esme easier.

I knew the moment he saw her, the second he tried to touch her. Her life, an abridged version like mine, was coming to a close. Her baby would die. There was no way I could stop that inescapability, but a few words could bring them both completion.

_Esme Snider. _

In the weeks following, Carlisle's stroll was accompanied by a happy whistle, a jaunty tune.

He'd met her, spoken to her, learned she wasn't married… she understood he was _marred._ And accepted him as her Pied Piper.

I knew worse was to come, but it wasn't in me to stop the tearing open of life. It wasn't my part to play God.

I understood that deification was beyond my scope.

Their time was coming, I was sure of that… but it wouldn't be a pretty thing, not at first.

Not at all.

_~~ll~~_

Pacing his den, Carlisle wondered irritably where the young woman had been these last mornings during his walks to the hospital.

She was being wheeled into the local hospital, her heart malfunctioning, her body giving way, her back completely distorted.

Pounding the stairs, I demanded of Carlisle, "You must go to the infirmary now!"

Hours passed. I laid out all the implements I remembered with blinded eyes.

When he entered, the back door crashing on its hinges, I left the house. I wasn't stout enough to relive the nightmare.

I'd done what I could.

Even in the forest, when she woke, I could hear the blood-curdling screams.

It took her much less time than me.

Guardedly I observed this young mother who'd been robbed of her bairn as she glided, not quite effortlessly but no less imperially, from womanhood to vampirehood.

The pieta in our garden was not a tomb, but a memorial for her little Annaliese Carolla.

I laid flowers of every season upon the font, running, sprinting north and south and east and west, nightly, for snowbells and crocuses and tulips and canna lilies and bougainvillea.

_Every night._

I presented her with a bouquet of heavy yellow daffodils and jarred Carlisle, "You could take a leaf from my book. Your lady likes flowers."

The next morning the garden was blooming, and an heirloom vase sat on the dining room table, rampant with fragrant florets.

A joyous smile walked across Esme's face as she strolled the landscape, her skirts held up to her thighs.

She blew a kiss to Carlisle as he stood on the patio.

He shuffled his feet.

I chortled and left them to it.

Through it all, Esme thought of her villainous husband, still alive.

She remembered her dear younger brother, still alive.

She rejoiced anew over her father, Wolfram's, death.

As did we.

She cried over her mother, Carolla Snider.

It was an affliction we shared.

Esme retained a maternal effervescence, a need to cherish and encourage and love. Affectionate and open and kindhearted, I gave my adoration to her quickly.

As did Carlisle, though he tried to barricade himself with books and work. Although he obstinately ignored the completely real and close, lifelong and intimate love beneath his own Patrician nose.

I understood he had no say in the matter.

Reaching out to me, Esme and I had many commonalities; motherless to childless, an equal devotion to Carlisle. A love of the arts. A keen sense of home.

Succor was what she gifted. I was inspired to play again, but one more thing to fill out my days and nights.

On an evening when we sat about our various pleasures, I stroked the keys, thinking of Isabella. An etude coiled through the parlor; optimistic to anxious to… dirge.

When I finished, I sat with my head bowed, until Esme yanked my hair, "Dear boy," I tugged away from her tickling fingers and interrupted, "_Dear boy?_ Who are you kidding, young lady? I'm already older than you."

"Upstart**.** As I was saying, you play beautifully, but I'm damn sick-" Carlisle's cough at her expletive interrupted her again but she simply arched an eyebrow in his direction until he put his nose back in his book, "of your depressive music. High time I took you to the dance halls."

Carlisle tried to cover his outburst of, "Ha!" with another ill-feigned cough.

Because I hadn't let him pull me into the Turner after Esme that first time, he thought I was incapable of living a little.

Carlisle politely declined Esme's invitation to join us.

More fool him.

She hid her disappointment beneath pretty carmine lipstick and a beautiful new dress that clung to her womanly curves, and had she not been my mother and my sister and my friend, I would have found her appearance utterly heart-stopping.

As Carlisle did.

Stepping down from the bottom step, Esme swept into the front room, hands on her hips, challenging.

The hard binding of a book clattered to the floor with a racket.

Esme smiled and titled her head and looked up at Carlisle through her feathery lashes.

Carlisle stood and swallowed. Stepped and stopped. Clenched his fists and looked all over her body and then to the floor before muttering, "Have a good time."

Startled by her insouciance, I followed Esme flouncing out the door without a backward glance.

The night was a wild cacophony of loud music and lusty dances and sweaty humans and smoky dens and trumpets blaring and slow, sexy music swirling. We circled the dancefloor, gracefully and naturally garnering the lion's share of attention. But all the while, my thoughts were on Isabella, and Esme's on Carlisle.

Returning home, flushed and happy, if even a little bit crushed, we giggled through the front door to be met by Carlisle in the foyer. Esme put her fingertip to my lips, and I rakishly claimed her touch, hoping to goad Carlisle to get off his high, unfortunate horse already. "Shhhh, darling, we've woken the man of the house."

With unrivaled carelessness, Esme brushed her hands over his torso as she sashayed past him, leaving me laughing and Carlisle gaping. With all she'd been through as a young girl, a married woman, her vibrant spirit never ceased to amaze me.

If only Carlisle could get past his stupidity.

I was less subtle as I knocked him aside with my elbow, shooting back, "You missed a good night, _Dad._ You might want to rethink your ideas before it's too late, you know Esme's one incredible lady."

I think he growled after me, but I hastily outran him to my bedroom, closing my door in his enraged, jealous face with a laugh.

I was entertained by the manner in which Esme finally managed her conquest of Carlisle. Amusingly, the centurion willfully disregarded her advances until Esme, a sensually enlivened female, conquered him with something so simple as a bath.

Water sloshed.

I left the house.

I came back to an intertwined couple; their hands and looks, even their lips took to each other.

_Freed, together._

Carlisle's words to Esme rang throughout our household, "You've made a man out of me, my love."

Meeting Carlisle in the hallway, I clasped his shoulder, as if I were the elder in our paternal bond, "'Bout time, Carlisle."

He damn near glowed.

Fit to burst with happiness.

_~~II~~_

Those first years, I had hope; a father in Carlisle, a mother, sister, friend in Esme, and a future in Isabella Swan.

_The next day they prepared themselves just as they did when they expected to meet the Woodpecker fairy, and set out. Soon they heard a howling and rustling unlike any thing ever known before.  
_

_"Make ready, master, the Scorpion Witch is coming."  
_

_The Scorpion Witch, with one jaw in the sky and the other on the earth, approached like the wind, spitting fire as she came, but the horse darted upward as swiftly as an arrow, and then rushed over her a little on one side._

Nine years was a long time to wait. Being the bachelor, untouched as a man and unaffected as a vampire, while Esme and Carlisle fell more deeply in love, exploring all their awakened carnal instincts, carved another void inside me. Rebellion lashed through me, and with vigilantism my excuse to cave into my despotic craving for mortal blood, I left.

A loner, I killed. A monster, I drank.

Because I was hopeless, and I had an excuse.

Charles Evanson.

That deleterious, ne'er-do-well son of a bitch.

He was my first stop.

Hurling invectives and thinking he could outrun me, he huffed and puffed with his overblown belly wobbling like tapioca pudding,his face a mash of curdled cheese, his eyes more mottled with red veins than mine.

'You, you -" he stopped and gasped, obese, opprobrious, out of breath.

Out of time.

I sneered at him with a cannibalistic smile lifting my lips, "Me?"

I thought his eyes would pop out of his head as I made my way to him, slowly, playing, "Me what?"

Perhaps I would just pop his eyes out of his head with the _pluck-pluck_ of my thumbs.

"You're not human!"

I grabbed him by the filthy shirt collar; he stank of fried meat and decay and sweat and unrefined alcohol, "Neither are you."

Punching him, not with my full power because I didn't want to kill him yet, I railed, "You remember Esme Snider?"

A trickle of urine darkened his pants.

_Kick and a crack of the four middle ribs on his left side._

"I'm going to visit upon you all the pain you dealt to _your wife._"

It was a good thing he still lived out in the middle of nowhere on that ramshackle farm because the shrill screams and bloodcurdling terror of his plea bargaining, the yells that became more and more _glugging_ as blood blocked his crushed nose and circled around the impasse of his mangled windpipe would have alerted a few neighbors.

In return for the inestimable lacerations I caused, making sure to put all my medical learning to good use in fracturing as many bones as possible while keeping him alive and conscious, I left him to die in exquisitely deserved agony.

I would never have touched one single drop of his vermin-blood.

Before leaving the area, I looked in on Schorsch and Carolla Snider. Esme's young brother had married a nice, plain girl named Jane. Their homestead was quiet, peaceful, healed.

My eyes a hemorrhagic miasma, my mutated nature raged like an uncontrollable fever.

If I didn't have a soul, why did I suffer from guilt for so many of the unrighteous lives I took?

I went back because this paltry existence without any love at all was morbidly terrifying.

The clan grew. Rosalie in 1934, then Emmett in 1935. They too, paired up.

Good people, they'd heard about Dr. Cullen and his small family of non-killers.

They were looking for a home amongst this wilderness of dangerous deities.

There was something about Emmett, his jocular nature, his rugged stature that reminded me, reminded me… _reminded me._

_Carty._

I pulled out the Brownie snapshot and handed it to Emmett _McCarty_, not saying a word.

"Well, ain't that somethin', Edward," he traced over Carty's face, the cheeks that knew the same dimples, the eyes that crinkled in smile just the exact way. "This here, this was my older cousin who moved up north, Carty Colter. I met him just the once, mind, oh back in the 20's, after he got back from The Great War, blessed be. He had the same dumb luck the rest of us McCartys had—leastwise until that foolhardy bear tripped up my life somethin' fierce—made it out of the trenches without a single case of lice and not even a bullet grazin' his skin."

_Carty Colter._

Motionless, I hardly blinked. I could almost remember his voice, more gruff than Emmett's, and the Tennessean wanderlust had been softened almost completely out of it by the time I knew him in Chicago.

"Yessir, last I heard he'd moved back down home and was working in the mines," Emmett flipped the picture over and read the date.

"They called me Mase," I remembered. _They'd called me Mase._

"And now, look at you, Edward, all fresh-faced, a young lad. Mase, eh? Well, you're wearing that same goofy smile right now." Like an older brother, he rubbed his knuckles into my hair and tested me until I pounced on him, and we rounded out the back door, toppling trees in our good-natured wrestling wake.

All the while, I looked for Isabella in every female face and figure. I scoured photographs in newspapers and magazines.

Estrangement was the only thing to be found from her.

Now I had a sister, a brother, a mother, a father, and I'd never felt more alone.

1936 found us in Forks, Washington. The damp drear place buckled a thick band around me with its gloomy call. She wasn't there either.

_~~II~~_

_The hero shot an arrow and one of her heads fell, but when he was going to strike off another, the Scorpion Witch entreated him to forgive her, she would do him no harm, and to convince him of this she gave him her promise, written in her own blood._

_Like the Woodpecker Fairy, she entertained the prince, who returned her head, which grew on again, and at the end of three days he resumed his travels._

_When the hero and his horse had reached the boundaries of the Scorpion Witch's kingdom they hurried on without resting till they came to a field covered with flowers, where reigned perpetual spring. Every blossom was remarkably beautiful and filled with a sweet, intoxicating fragrance; a gentle breeze fanned them all. They remained here to rest, but the horse said:_

_"We have arrived so far successfully, master, but we still have one great peril to undergo and, if the Lord helps us to conquer it, we shall really be valiant heroes. A short distance further on is the palace where dwell Youth without Age and Life without Death. It is surrounded by a high, dense forest, where roam all the wild animals in the world, watching it day and night. They are very numerous, and it is almost beyond the bounds of possibility to get through the wood by fighting them; we must try, if we can, to jump over them."_

Progressing to watercolors and pastels, their colors were the only soft hues in my world that was gray and bleak. I gave a rosy bloom to Isabella's cheeks, a pink tint to her pretty lips, a deep brown to her well-shaped eyes.

My fingers stained, my clothes splattered, I met our next two family members in 1950: Jasper and Alice. Also coupled.

The tiny young woman was gifted; she danced about like a Romanish _dialen_, a wood spirit.

Her mate, Jasper, pulled at me with another familial, familiar tug, this time not so easily fathomed. On showing him the now tattered, creased photograph, he gave me a sad smile, "Well, he does have the Whitlock looks—the gapped teeth and bowed legs—as well as the name, but I wouldn't have known him, Edward."

Of course not. Changed in 1863, all Jasper had had for many, many years was killing and blood and hate and armies and no family whatsoever.

I could only hold onto this new brotherly bond at an arm's safe distance.

Whenever I felt my mood shift away from loneliness and brighten from melancholy, I silently pleaded with Jasper to leave me alone to my anguish. Whenever Alice traipsed into a room trailing gleeful visions, optimism enlivened me! Perhaps she'd seen my girl in her prophetic machinations. Every shake of her head was a denial that dashed the last vestiges of my faith.

Inevitably, eras changed. Unstoppably I watched each second passing, seasoned in maddening inertia. Fashions altered, new music genres were born, presidents were inaugurated, impeached, assassinated. World War II, the Vietnam War, the Cold War. Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. New weapons, new greed, new patriotism.

I alone was frozen solid, unmoving, stuck in an ice age and faltering.

My beauty to human women was evidenced by repellant, fatuous ideas. Decades on and those images of me with them, nakedly writhing, were replaced by trepidation. My supernatural attractiveness became muted by the corpse emptiness of my eyes and my insufferable attitude.

When our unaging verged on the obvious, we moved on. That was one more modification highlighting my intractability.

Like the sky, that endless dome that sheltered the world, I knew it to be round and all-encompassing, but like me, it seemed punctuated and flat.

Seventy-seven years was an interminable lifetime to attend amidst the love of three married couples. I alone was marred. The explicitness of their sexual congress taunted me, haunted me with sensual intimacy I'd never known; I felt no such urges for sex. I imbibed the blood of animals merely because the pain of starving myself was too great to witness in the horror written on Esme's face.

Seeking to soothe me, Esme held her hand to my cheek and whispered up at me, "You're a classic, Edward." Translation: _You'll never change._

"A real class act," Carlisle followed up, curling one arm around my shoulders. Meaning: _I'm so relieved you amended your ways, you've remained here with us, a prime example of our ethos._

Jasper knocked his fist to my chest, "A hard act to follow." He alone filled me with torment and guilt, for what right did I have to be so existentially pained when his formative years had been filled with untold massacres of innocents, and he'd overcome that goriness?

Emmett put his hand to his heart, his eyes to the heavens, and quoted:

_All the world's a stage,  
And all the men and women merely players;  
They have their exits and their entrances,  
And one man in his time plays many parts,  
His acts being seven ages._

A near-smile broke free of my mouth at his jesting. And then fell with the realization my seven ages should now be over with a mighty curtain call.

Rosalie intoned quizzically, "Actions speak louder than words, Edward." She was right, but I'd never been given the chance to act!

Breaking the mold, hugging me tight, Alice whispered in my ear, "I've seen what you're thinking, Edward. _Please don't. She will come._"

I was jaded. It felt like my eulogy had been enacted.

Decade upon decade was to be filled. I was always watchful, waiting and noting. A nothing, an abyss, inconsolable. I turned into a husk of a man, a fossilized scarab, and no one wanted to know me. I scared the witless human populace with an aloofness that was much cooler than the temperature of my body.

How could I tell them I was just so forlorn? What if Isabella Swan was never real, not even as a figment in my mind? What if the only time I'd ever see her was that brief moment when I was a seventeen-year-old young man, inside my bedroom, within my nocturnal wanderings?

In the old days, in the twenties, thirties, forties and fifties, Carlisle and I had still communed for many late nights over the coming of the Swan. With the eighties and then nineties I read the heavy dismay that sat over him. He no longer spoke her name to me, though it was the one _damned thing_ I needed!

Eighty-seven years was hell.

Oils now were what I worked with, heavy with thick visual brushstrokes and the stink of turpentine overshadowing the viscous greasiness of linseed oil. Dripping rich colors bespeaking the darkness niggling and worming through my entrails.

Crumbling like flakes of paint on palettes whose colors bled together, a most morose idea came to me: _If she did exist, if she did find me, would Isabella be human_? I'd never delved that conundrum , I knew_, _I thought, that she had been mortal and would remain so._ Why would_ _a woman not of my breed want me?_

Shadowy midnight hours found me bivouacked in the corner of my room, rocking, keening silently just as I had upon waking as a vampire.

Eighty -seven years and I was tempted to end my life by the only means possible, at the hands of the Volturi, the royal peacekeepers of the vampire nation. Perhaps, if I believed in my soul, I would have been courageous enough…because Eliza and Edward would be there waiting.

It was called euthanasia now. I preferred the succinctness of suicide, for that's what it would be.

I wore my mother's ring on a long chain, close to the heart she'd given away. I'd forgiven her the moment I'd claimed Carlisle as my father.

Hopeless and foundering, I infected the lives of my brothers and sisters, my mother and father. Just as diseased now as I had been when influenza had made grotesque messes of Edward and Eliza Masen as well as myself… _I was Typhoid Mary._

_~~II~~_

_After resting about two days they prepared to continue their journey, and the horse, holding its breath, said:_

_"Buckle my girth as tight as you can, and when you have mounted hold fast to my mane and press your feet close to my neck, that you may not hinder me." The prince mounted, and in a moment they were close to the forest._

_"Master," said the horse, "this is the time that the wild beasts are fed; they are all collected together, now we'll jump over."_

_"Forward," replied the handsome prince, "and may the Lord have mercy on us."_

_They flew upward and saw the palace, which glittered so that it would have been easier to look at the sun. They passed over the forest, and, just as they were descending at the palace steps, one of the horse's hoofs lightly touched the top of a tree, which put the whole woods in motion. The wild animals began to howl till it was enough to make one's hair bristle. They hastily alighted, and if the mistress of the palace had not been outside feeding her chickens (for that is what she called the wild beasts), they would certainly have been killed._

One morning in the winter of 2005, back in Forks, I growled and then laughed insanely at my reflection in the mirror. My clothing looked like I'd been to a London haberdasher; I stuck out like a sore thumb even without being a mythological nightwalker.

Trying on the vernacular of my peers while I prepared for another stultifying day at Forks High, I muttered, "Well, this sucks."

In honor of my new devil-may-care attitude, I hurriedly changed into jeans and a t-shirt.

Alice saw it first. Meeting me at the bottom rung of the staircase, she turned to powder and vapor before my eyes and then internally recited the most recent Paris fashions, complete with details of trim, heights of heels, gold, silver or beaded accessories, effectively angering and emboldening me.

Blocking my advance to the door, she gated it with her wee powerful body while negating me access to her thoughts, "Don't go to school, Edward. _Please_, I'm begging you, don't go!"

Questioning my sister, I stamped back and forth in the foyer, knowing I could outrun her if I really wanted to; I needed to understand the reason for her odd reaction.

As if she had a migraine, she brought her hands to her scalp and her eyes cringed shut, "Bella Swan."

_Bella Swan?_

_Isabella Swan?_

_My Isabella!_

I had no choice.

Nothing could have kept me away.

Racing to the high school, I swung into my allotted space with precision. _She's come to me. Through the leagues of time, Isabella… no, Bella Swan!_ My equanimity dissembled as I scoured the pathetic minds of the student body, looking for my one.

I heard her name spoken, and they referred to her as Isabella, just as I'd done for almost a century. But I had insider information, and I knew her preferred appellation.

A spark of long hair, a sway of hips here and there, a bashful laugh and a chagrined look, I leapt from mind to mind as if jumping over stepping stones in my pursuit of Bella.

She was always one step ahead.

_No, no, no, not her!_

The bell rang for first period. Alice caught up with me and tried to tow me back to my car. Jasper stood aside while I struggled, Emmett thought, "_I've got your back, bro."_ Rosalie worried mutely, _"I wash my hands of this."_

"ALICE!" My bellowing voice shook the tarmac like thunder and near-shattered the windshields of the pickups in our vicinity. Through clenched snapping teeth I teetered on the edge of lunacy, "Let. Me. Go."

I sped to Biology with my siblings forming a barrier around me. Since when did I need bodyguards?

The scent hit me before I even opened the door.

I cracked the plexiglass with my fists and fell to the floor. My eyes wild, my nostrils seeking more of the fragrance that crammed me with a yearning for blood so deep it sat inside my very spirit, jeering at me, ridiculing me like Lucifer. Half of me scrabbled with the door knob, and the other half wanted to crawl back down the hallway between the drab lockers, to run to the other side of the world, to find a black cave empty of all light, so I would never be tempted by _her_ luscious, lovely, pure, quintessentially tantalizing aroma again.

_Bella Swan was my cantante. _My song and my _chanteuse._

Standing slowly, I buttressed myself and beseeched, "Please, let me try. Alice?"

She nodded, and they all let me go.

Opening the portal, I staggered beneath her luxurious bouquet. Stumbling, I made it to my lab table where she sat on a high stool.

I couldn't look at her. Not yet.

Seated, I watched Mr. Banner. Pitching forward, I trapped my fingers in my hair and denied the potent murderous intent that topped up the formerly empty vessel of my body.

I stopped breathing altogether, it was the only defense mechanism I had. Desiring to stare at my vision brought to life, I instead looked to the small glass square in the door finding four pairs of liquid metal eyes looking back at me. Like taking a sip of vintage wine, I supped sidelong glances at my swan.

Fine and flushed with blood.

I pinched my nose shut at the bridge. Lowered my eyes to the black tabletop.

How utterly appalling, this killing instinct enlivened for the one woman who had inspired hope for almost one hundred years! In love with a figment I now wanted nothing more than to slay, even while I yearned with beating passion to know her, save, and protect her, make her body mine instead of her blood. Wonderment to lethal intentions and eroticisms all roiled inside me as I sat in this nondescript schoolroom; a laboratory full of teenagers, and the young woman who'd first enthralled me in 1918.

_All these years, waiting._

It could have been no different. I should have been prepared. She was the epitome of life and death and wanting to kill and needing to love.

_A cosmic joke._

Quietly sitting next to me was my _one._ The waved curtain of her hair secluded her. I wanted at once to pull the tresses over her shoulder and slice her throat with my teeth and tickle her perfect waist with my touch.

Ironically, this all made sense. My singer was my vision, the only woman I'd ever loved yanked lust and leviathan homicidal tendencies out of me. Forks, _of course_. For, had I not felt a taut, staunch link to this town seventy years earlier? And now, I was immune to her mind. Blank as the chalkboard behind our teacher, her thoughts were shuttered.

All the things I'd never known were wrapped up like a devious, deliciously pure and lovely present in the singular woman I'd always aspired to meet.

She moved with human poise away from me when the bell tolled, beckoning us students to our next class.

I fell to the table and stilled. Breathing again, ingesting the last samples of her smell.

I'd done it. I'd managed.

I understood.

Nothing was simple. Love was bargained for.

I had a choice. I wouldn't be waylaid by my gut-deep wildness. Overcoming the loathsome gluttony of my thirst, I'd talk to her tomorrow.

I felt stronger than I had in years. Meeting my siblings in the hallway, I even smiled.

Their quiet congratulations were modulated by anxiety, but their words were singularly the best thing I'd ever heard.

Until I found her voice.

It pushed me to my knees, her light, translucent, mellifluous and slightly husky tone.

Staying away from Bella the rest of the day, I went home and lay on my sofa and believed.

Pain beyond measure made me fold into myself again the next day, but my desire for her heart was stronger than my starvation for her sanguinity. _I felt._

It was either Bella Swan or the death of us both.

I chose life.

I chose love.

I spat on death.

I'd take it slow, I'd tell her everything, _I'd probably overwhelm her_. The shape of a grin sliding up my lips was foreign, splendid.

Week two and I was ready.

Though in ignoring her, I had a lot to make up for.

I found charm and smiles I never knew I had. They came effortlessly for her, and she welcomed my attentions, after a first snit that was decidedly endearing, in keeping with her obstinacy, and completely just.

We shook hands, and I almost dropped off my stool.

Venom filled my mouth like saliva, not for blood, but for her caress.

I yearned to feel that heavy chestnut hair sliding between my fingers as I pressed against her delicious mouth, a slightly more lively pink than I'd reckoned, to feel the heft of her small, round breasts held up by my hands alone, fingertips striding up to test nipples. Clothed in the fashions of her contemporaries meant little was left to my imagination, and I squandered not an ounce of observation taking in her bottom shaped like a heart, her legs so long and slim I envisioned around my hips, her waist high and lithe. Bella's skin would be hot, soft, and smooth… _oh to hold her in my arms!_

A physical reaction, for the first time since I'd masturbated to hallucinations of her in Chicago, 1918, a young man about to be sent to war, my groin jerked with wanton need just as my weightless heart pulsed with broiling love. I was unschooled in how to contain this covetousness as much as the bloodlust pounding through my vitals.

I shifted slightly away, but held her hand nonetheless and questioned her lowly so as not to attract Banner's attention. Our fingers tangled and stroked, an impropriety I couldn't deny.

Not once did she shrink back, her answers were plainspoken. Her compelling reaction heartened me.

"Bella, I know this is a bit forward, but would you care to study with me this evening?" I smiled and that lifting of my mouth was becoming more and more usual. My eyes leapt to hers, my legs quaked… _what if she said no?_

She said yes.

I shooed everyone away to far rooms of the house when her knock sounded.

I lived inside her words, "Hi, Edward. Thanks for inviting me."

Relieving her of her coat, I ushered Bella up the stairs.

She turned on the landing and cajoled, "You know, you do have a lot to make up for. You weren't very friendly my first weeks."

I chuckled. Flustered, I ran my hands up and down her bare arms, saturated in her warmth and ripeness, "I'm sorry, Bella, I have my reasons," I hushed against the swarthy twine of her locks, just beneath her ear.

At the door of my room, I realized my mistake.

_Why hadn't Alice reminded me?_

With no recourse, I ushered Bella in, her hand braided with mine.

The soft acoustic ruminations of Ray LaMontagne clouded my bedroom. _Can you see the wise man simply living, loving quietly, every breath he takes eternity, till the sun turns black..._

Releasing her, I watched her walk around my bedroom.

I sank against the wall and waited retribution.

Sketches of her spilled over every surface. Paintings, pastels, line drawings. Almost one hundred years of Bella was everywhere to be seen.

Her fingers lingered, her eyes widened and deepened to dark brown and queried silently.

I couldn't look her in the face.

Inspecting the images more closely on her second pass, Bella took note of the diverse materials, and I saw her stroke her fingers across the dates at the bottom right corner of each piece.

Perception like earthen quartz crystal lit her eyes as she came back to me, her hands rummaging up my body as they had through the canvases and boards and thick papers, "It's me."

Her mouth was so close. She hadn't run screaming. I leant down and pulled just her lips into mine, mumbling against heat and wet, "It's you."

With her fingers on my neck and mine like melted iron to her dainty hips, tugging her up to me more strongly, Bella plucked once, twice, thrice against my mouth. Groaning, I ran a hand to her rear and my purchase there was needy and dear. Our tongues touched innocently, our hips moved around each other, at first tentatively before inimitable yearning crossed over us like ribbons of silk robbing me of breath and sense. Her breasts sweltered fully against me to an earthly feeling of such utter softness and sensuousness.

My body was alive as my mind.

With a gasp, Bella stole back. Her palm remained to my torso where nothing beat. She rubbed like a heartbeat and kissed my jaw from one side to the other, a fiery feasting of plush humidity until I groaned lowly, and then she asked low and clear and fearless, "How long, Edward?"

Raising her to me, her legs around my waist, her knees resting sideways on my hips, her heels locked atop my ass, my erection growing with a heady pulsing into her body just where all of her ardor centered, the nape of Bella's warm neck nestled in one hand, my voice thick and raw and subdued against her pillow pink mouth, "Eighty-seven years, Bella. And I would wait that long again to know you."

"It's always been you," I pursed my mouth to her shoulders, opened my lips to her bosom, brought her nipples inside my lips, lapped her belly, bringing her clothes down her body.

Every limb unveiled, every twist and arch of her shivered traces of constellations through my body, centering in my cock.

All supple, a texture I'd never known. Arms and legs, breasts and belly flushed and thistledown smooth. _Oh, god, her back!_ The length of it, sweet and straight, knew the path of my cool hands, my fingers lingering in hollows, the dips, the swales that made a sumptuous, fruitful boundary to her buttocks. Sitting on my knees, sinking to my heels, I stared. Curving in, her waist was completely womanly. I made my fingers fit into the slopes. I curled my palms around her hips, like bowls, I held her bottom rounds in my hands and placed a long kiss to the base of her spine.

My paintings could never compare.

How much I'd missed!

"_It's us_," Bella's smoky words, no more than a sigh as she braced her hands on my shoulders, floated into my inexpert adulation.

I stood. She stepped back. I wondered, and smiled and replenished my century's deadened sight with the full, gorgeous nudity of her milk and rosebud skin. She hefted her breasts beneath an arm, not concealing them... _offering them._ And she came closer again.

They were buds of silk, the nipples more vibrant and erect. Minute goose bumps surrounded the palest pink areolas when I breathed and then lapped and then sucked.

My cheeks rasped her cleavage while I licked up and down and side to side, down to her navel, over the points of her hips that tasted like a promise of ten decades about to make me a man, I whispered, "It's us."

Bella swiveled against me and every motion was filled with eroticism. Strumming against my mouth and then sinking her tongue deep inside, stroking my inner cheeks and slipping, satin, against mine, she found my untouched skin. Inside my trousers, the buttons undone, the buckle laying hastily sideways and clanking open, fingers pointed down, she worked under the waistbands and reached me quickly. Cold and hard, tall and rigid, I hissed when she lilted her fingers up and down lightly, figuring my length, my velvetiness, "_So… oh, Edward!"_ Her cheeks were bright and her mouth open, like mine, her eyes almost completed by her pupils, the brown irises disappearing, "_Cold, hot… hard. Oooh, but so so… silky."_

Strengthening, Bella linked her fingers together after wetting them between her legs with her tangent arousal and stroked my shaft; liquid and heat and running over me as I shook and every muscle inside me topped up to the surface with rigidity.

I hauled my clothes away so I was naked as her.

My chest knew caresses. Fondling the metallic links of the chain that circled my neck, Bella took up the ring I'd made a pendant and kissed it before placing it aside, "Your mother's ring."

My heart soared.

I poured out words from the folk story left to me by my mother, "_She spared their lives out of pure pleasure, for she had never before seen a human being. Restraining the savage beasts, she soothed them, and sent them back to their haunts. She was a tall, slender, lovely fairy, quite too beautiful. When the young hero saw her, he stood still as though turned to stone." _

Wrapping her arms around my waist until my cock nestled and moved against her belly, Bella breathed, "_But as she gazed at him she pitied him and said:  
_

_'Welcome, my handsome prince. What do you seek here?'"  
_

_"I seek Youth without Age and Life without Death," _I murmured against her wet mouth.

She touched every sinew until I was toughened inside and out by the strain of delirious awakening. The insides of my elbows to her mouth, my armpits and every centimeter of my throat to her lips. Around my back she moved languorously, clasping my ass. Pliant tits pressed into my shoulders, and I moaned. Her arms beneath mine, Bella reached around, sliding her hands from my tensed ribs to the hair below my belly button, tangling and jerking it up. She skipped my cock, rained fingertips to the trembling flesh behind my knees. Ascending my thighs, in between so my breath was spatters like rain slashing a windshield, Bella held my balls and bent forward to place those fast-learning fingers on my erection.

I jumped and jolted and cried out with such insurmountable hunger.

I stole her over me, her weight like feathers, her grace incomparable. I sat with her on my lap, her legs opening on either side of me, bending up at the knees in readiness. Palms to the floor, her ass and racy wetness against my cock.

I made certain first, shakiness in my tummy and tautening up my entire frame, "Bella, I want to make love with you."

Nodding her head, her lips curved up, and she sighed, "Yes."

As soon as I clenched her hips, she arced, her breasts rising high. The most stunning sight I'd ever seen! One forearm locked behind her back, one to her waist, I burrowed slowly inside. _Oh hell! There was nothing… there was nothing like this._ With just my head inside, she clamped down, a vice of fire and juiciness.

I bit down on my lip and only unleashed it to assure, "I'll go slowly, my love."

Her face was craven with need.

A mirror of mine. A vision I'd witnessed once in my adolescent dreams.

Little lunges while I beat back savagery. Sensually, with all the gentleness I could muster, I made way inside of her virgin body with my own.

A slight tear, her mouth forming an 'O', and the twist on her face caused me to halt. I waited and tenderly rounded her clitoris until her hips started to sway.

The smile on my mouth was hard with desire to move.

"All right?"

"_Fuck, yes."_

My hands formed a seat to lift her rear. Her legs shifted against me, heightening all of my senses. Slick heat ran against me inside her tightness.

My back curled forward, hers ratcheted backward, my neck pounded to the side, and we both gasped as I tugged her down onto me.

My eyes were wide and young and amazed.

Her motions on top of me burnished my cock, lightened my spirit.

The intense red of her swollen shell slid up and down my erection. _Up and down_. Over and over with my hands settling to her hips, her waist, switching to her breasts that tippled over my mouth.

Steeped in something so corporeal and completely out of body.

I nuzzled her neck, took her nipples to my lips, made them long and bright and delicious.

Euphoria of the flesh, the soul.

All I felt was the blaze of her. Over my body, touching my muscles with her fingers digging to my stomach, goring my ribs, pushing into my navel, stroking down the line of hair that led to my penis plunging in and out of her passage.

Her face to my shoulder where she bit helplessly, my teeth to her ear where I moaned penuriously, slicking into Bella, wishing I'd been able to stave my longing enough to bring her to bed.

I enfolded her and laid her back onto the floor instead.

While I leaned up and put my palms to the rug, she gyrated down and lapped my chest, my nipples, my biceps and the shivery skin hollowed from my elbows and wrists. Twisting below me, her hands cupped my bum and pulled a harder thrust out of me.

"Please, _fuck please, Bella._ If you don't stop, this will be all over!" I frowned at the expletive that exploded from my throat and grated and knew I couldn't halt the orgasm rippling from my sac up through my shaft with shivery waves that made collapsing sluices of my venom-filled veins.

Each stroke in and every lunge out bred sounds that I'd never thought I'd hear. Gasps that held my name sacrosanct, plunges that made a liquid home for my cock.

Arching her back, whipping up with her hips, Bella became a rainbow below me, bowed, beating up, scraping my chest with her nipples and raking my musculature with nails that would never score me.

I held her buttocks to me, made her still, felt the striations of her whimpers and pleading into my shoulder. Diving in and out, licking the deep, damp line of her cleavage, I brought her hard up to me, swung down fast into her, and felt the pulse-beat of our orgasms illumining the world and detonating my past.

Sweaty, wet, and tired, Bella curled around me. Laughing softly, knowing love and closeness, I bore her up and wrapped her in my skin and soft blankets, billeting her in my soul.

I kissed her heartbeat, her wrist. She nuzzled my elbow, held my still-hard penis with a lax hand and cupped my bottom with the other.

A leg lifted, one plied between. Arms wound. Sighs lifted and lowered with her sleepy breaths and our loving words.

Dearly, chanting, enchanting, "A century?"

Happily, infatuated, forever, "Yes."

Her palm cradled my face and simply she said, "I've known you, too." Bella's eyes were hazy now, with slumber and repletion. Her body enwrapped me.

I swallowed back a lifetime of emotion. I let loose my untiring vigilance. I could hold her. _I could hold Bella forever._

From tragedy and solitude to solace, and the beginning.

_The keeper of my soul._

What did she know?

* * *

~~What? What? You want to hear from Bella? Oh, do you? Okay. Next. Thank you so much, I am really pleased y'all are getting into this story~~

The real _Youth without Age and Life without Death_ folk story can be read here (or you can wait, because I'm including it all as we go along):

www(DOT)childrenstories(DOT)ca/Stories/Youth-Without-Age-And-Life-Witho(DOT)html

**Jaques:**  
_All the world's a stage,  
And all the men and women merely players;  
They have their exits and their entrances,  
And one man in his time plays many parts,  
His acts being seven ages._

_As You Like It Act 2, scene 7, 139–143_

Voting has commenced for the **Giggle Snort Awards**—Eddie's been nominated in the Small Fry category (he's _really_ not happy about his placement in that particular 'class', if you know what I mean, but I'm super excited!) for Dead Confederates. The link is on my profile and voting closes June 4th.

I've been nominated as Best Author at the **Twilight AH Fanfiction Awards**, that's really cool! Voting to be announced, link to the site on my profile.

Finally, I just completed my very angsty, very sexy three chapter fic, _Surrender._ Go, read, send me some sugar?

Oh! And many thanks to Pears13 of _Stealing Second_ for recently reccing _YwA_ and _DC's_!

Cheers, Rie~


	8. Flight

To the grammar goddess, Vanessarae, and the content countess, Viola Cornuta, who whip my work into shape and let me do naughty, naughty things with my characters, cheers!

Much love to everyone who's been reading this little legend, and to my DW women.

Disclaimer: This is just one little, tiny slice of what Twilight might have been like, in an alternate universe ;).

~This, I think, is different. I hope you like it~

This song, _Big Jet Plane_ by Angus & Julia Stone, was my inspiration:

www(DOT)youtube(DOT)com/watch?v=yFTvbcNhEgc

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Eight: Flight**

**Bella Higgin Swan**

_The bird flutters round us, swift as light, beauteous in color, charming in song. When a mother sits by her infant's cradle, he stands on the pillow, and, with his wings, forms a glory around the infant's head. He flies through the chamber of content, and brings sunshine into it, and the violets on the humble table smell doubly sweet._

_The Phoenix bird, dost thou not know him? The Bird of Paradise, the holy swan of song! On the car of Thespis he sat in the guise of a chattering raven, and flapped his black wings, smeared with the lees of wine; over the sounding harp of Iceland swept the swan's red beak; on Shakspeare's shoulder he sat in the guise of Odin's raven, and whispered in the poet's ear "Immortality!" and at the minstrels' feast he fluttered through the halls of the Wartburg._

_The Bird of Paradise—renewed each century—born in flame, ending in flame! Thy picture, in a golden frame, hangs in the halls of the rich, but thou thyself often fliest around, lonely and disregarded, a myth—"The Phoenix of Arabia."_

_In Paradise, when thou wert born in the first rose, beneath the Tree of Knowledge, thou receivedst a kiss, and thy right name was given thee—thy name, Poetry._

~From_ The Phoenix Bird_, Hans Christian Andersen

"_I've known you, too."_

His body had cooled me, his timbre a humming melody, his radiance inscribed on my skin as his fingers had painted over me, and inside of me had been watered the seed planted in my childhood.

Edward's beauty, finally corporeal, massed, and poetic, gave me vertigo.

To touch his jaw, the most crisp, clean, sharp bone. To lick his mouth and outline his tongue with my own made me dizzy.

His Ramses cock hardening below the soft skin of my thighs sent me spinning into an erotic wonderland of expectation delivered, _at last_, with his fingers inside my wetness, his lips a plush ecstasy pulling moans and cries from me.

Charlie had thought I was crazy, to believe…in the end.

The paintings and sketches and one hundred years worth of longing cascading from every corner of Edward's room had been the promise I'd been searching for my entire life. In rich colors and light drawings and charcoal likenesses, he'd spent hours, days, years, decades gambling on me when there was nothing but the remnants of a dream as his touchstone.

Edward didn't scare me.

I'd first met him when I was six years old, rummaging through a beaten up trunk Mom had stowed away in the musty attic of the house she no longer lived in. Cobwebs clung to the lock and then my fingers. Their sticky cotton wool congested between my knuckles as I'd pried open the lid. Inside were _treasures._

Gold booty. A pair of earrings so heavy I had trouble lifting them in my child's hands—they were wieldy sculptures of goats with emerald gems for eyes.

And underneath it all, a black and white photograph. A Midwestern midway. A Ferris wheel was captured in the background; in the forefront of the faded picture was a young man. A boy on the cusp of manhood. A stunning vision with a wild sweep of hair, the strength of his jaw already denoting the generative man he'd become. With him, smiling effortlessly, was a feminine, cloudy, dandelion-haired counterpoint to his serious visage. At my young age, I was just beginning to read so it was with a scowl and frown and sounding-out the dwindling letters on the back: _Edward Anatolia Masen and Lieselotte Higgin. 1916. _

I carried it around like a security blanket. My photo to his paintings.

I'd had an imaginary friend. I served him tea and mud pies in the driveway on top of the old, frayed, slightly moth-bitten watercolor shawl that Renee had used to wrap up the Higgin family Bible, a leatherbound tome filled with detailed drawings, calligraphy, illuminations, and dates.

I'd called him Edward and consulted my very own workbook: _Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls._ It was splattered in dirt and grass stains and my own stick-people art.

Lenient and amused, Dad had made light of the situation, "You're going to wear a hole in that thing if you keep it on you at all times, Bella."

I'd pretended he was talking about Giggles, my mangled sock monkey.

But he'd never been a figment, _no_. I had the picture. I had his name. He was linked to me, my family.

The Black Dutch Higgins and the Romany Anatolians. These things I knew from Mom, fortunes told throughout the years.

On first sight, the very first goddamn time I'd seen his likeness in that telltale photograph, I had known.

_A picture of fate._

Not ephemeral, not ethereal—this boy named Edward was always real, the very meaty marrow in my bones.

Omnipresent.

My boatswain through life.

"You should date, Bella," Dad had tried to encourage me as I got closer and closer to womanhood, his tone transforming from complicity to detachment, "Cross my heart, I promise to shelve my gun and welcome your beaux."

"I'm not unhappy, Dad," I'd tousled his hair and made my way to the fridge. At seventeen-years-old tossing him a beer that he caught without looking, our routines were familiar. Even when I'd been just a summer visitor all the years following my parents' divorce, there'd been an effortless ease between us.

Acceptance.

"But you're pining." He'd turned to straddle the kitchen chair, jockeying it onto its rear legs, admonishing me.

"I'm not frigging _pining_. I'm _waiting._" I drank my Coke but eyed his brew, really just needing to relax. Thinking to myself, with the secret smile of a lover guiding my lips up, _"I'm infatuated."_

A hive of hormones buzzing, nesting, filling my awakening desires with nectar, I'd been enchanted to Forks, to live with my dad permanently my final year of high school.

_Manifest destiny._

He was here.

Tucked into my bed, my blankets fresh from the Sunday wash, I'd let go summer and innocence the night before my initial day at Forks High.

Smothering the pillow over my face, I'd suffocated my moans, my fingers sliding down my naked body to the wealth of want between my legs.

I may not have been capricious or promiscuous, but I was still a teenager, nearly a woman in search of a man's touch.

_Inescapable desire._

Edward was here; I felt the essence of _belonging_ as I came in lush gyrations under the knuckle-deep thrusts of my own fingers, my palm rubbing my clit, my lips still chaste, unkissed.

_Timeless, limitless, devotional._

Passionate.

In the morning, I'd opened our Bible, the thing now limp from being deciphered of bleeding penmanship with our names linked, and scraped my fingers over the page where Christ stood next to his cross. Heavenly light shone from his embrace of his hallows. _Embracing death._

And then, I'd seen him.

In the parking lot. Surrounded by inhumanly ravishing creatures, like himself.

The bell tolled.

Choking between the need to run to him and probably scare him witless and to hide behind trees, or better yet, catch the next flight back home, I'd felt his eyes searching.

Seeking.

Discovering.

Unreal, beautiful.

_Real, and here._

He had aged perhaps two years from the time stamp of the 1900's Kodak box camera and now.

_This wasn't make-believe, this wasn't a fairytale._

His eyes, hopeful and lit up with Helios' rays, were divine.

The scribe of his lips when he finally made to me was hellish.

_This was a nightmare._

This Edward, the one sitting next to me in Bio lab two weeks later, had been a real fucking asshole.

Overlaying the immutable recognition of _us_, was his vileness, my resignation… our _resonation._

Determined not to hurt, I'd felt the stiff and woody handle of a dagger plunge into my heart nonetheless.

My hair a curtain shielding me, I'd scored demonic outlines in my notebook.

He hadn't breathed.

A rush of exquisiteness had gladed through me, an abrupt _need_ to see him between my bare thighs, his ruby-red mouth sucking at my pussy, pressing, tickling, his smile glistening, his voice laughing, his hands grappling with my hips to bring me closer, unseating me from the stool until I stood with a heel to the fret and one on his shoulder as he limbered his long, sexy tongue throughout every tuck and unfurled part of my cunt.

In reality, Edward had breathed and bent his head forward, his neck taut with veins and muscle and man and something else. He'd smelled the air like a predator homing in on the kill, looking towards my inner thighs as my legs spread beneath the mere assault of his tufted glare.

"Oh, Christ," he'd mumbled. His fingers had strained into the benchtop and pulled splinters of black-lacquered wood apart like they were nothing more than plastic fucking straws striped in red and white.

I almost hadn't heard it, his near mute, ragged sigh, _"Isabella."_

Stunned, pushing my high perch back, I'd pivoted so the scent from inside my legs hit him afresh and his eyes blazed, only to wander to the door. Following suit, I'd been met by four pairs of sanguine amber searching looks.

_They were waiting._

I gave a small wave.

My smile had fallen then. I'd lowered my eyes to Edward's groin. A distinct emblem of rigid, thick, long want filled his jeans.

He had been absolutely rude and unpleasant that day and for another week straight. And then another.

Apart from the fact he obviously wanted to lay me down and give me a good seeing–to, Edward forewent air whenever he was near me, he didn't address me, he'd barely looked at me.

_Oh, but when he did… I was twisted between wanting to smack his indescribably handsome face and kiss him until I bled._

Now we were back here, at the scene of the almost-crime. Under Banner's tutelage. Doing a poor job of ignoring each other.

I'd spent the first two days after our cataclysmic coming together simply looking at him with a goofy-as-fuck smile on my face, my head leaning on my hands; staring, dazed, and still feeling the succulent ramrod of his delicious dick inside of me, the way he'd swirled his pelvis around to hit my clit and decimate any other thought but the striking _feel_ of him. Inside me.

I still expected him to evaporate like a mirage, a desert oasis of calm and excitement.

Scribbling in my college-ruled notebook, I shoved it towards him, "Are you here? Do you exist?"

His voice so low I hardly believed what I was hearing, "Define existence, Isabella." His smirk made me grin; his lover's nickname had me swooning.

And then he wrote, "I've _existed_ solely to meet you, my love. I'm here, I'm real."

I'd had my lesson in Biology, not to mention human anatomy, a week ago. _Human anatomy?_ God, there was nothing human about Edward's physique; the cold, the icy smooth, the velvet over iron, the intoxication and sweet breeze of his breath, the breadth of his chest slipping down to the narrowness of his hips and the firm and flexing muscles of his ass.

He made me feral. With his decorum and manners… I wanted to nip his bum, massage and rub the sexy trail of hair that fell from his abdomen with all its ups and downs to the downy snack of pubic hair a copper crown to his prick.

_A week ago, and not a damn touch since_! _Now, _I was just horny and getting more and more ornery.

Nothing that went beyond propriety, unless he needed to demonstrate his proprietary, primal ownership of me, our belonging to each other and no one fucking else. _Ever_. A rumble of a growl at those times accompanied his cherished berry lips, sculpted just so from stony cold to a weird and wild tingling heat every time our tongues met, melded, pressed, delved.

More than once he'd pulled my hair to bring me off of him, my lips wet, his warring with feast or famine or fucking.

I'd rub his torso with my tits, nude and nipples scraping and designing and devilish.

I'd pounce on him and rip open his jeans and plaster his cock with hands and needy lips… so kissing, so filtering, so gripping, so swallowing.

"We've waited so long, baby," he'd curtly nod and nudge his dick further into the clasp of my mouth.

Then he'd swivel out of me; a staggeringly lengthy, turgid erection—inches upon inches with ribbons of veins and the head of him, _Oh sweet Hell,_ darkly colored and dripping with toxin.

I'd pout between his legs as he stamped his feet on the floor, floored by this goddamn desire arching between us.

"I am real this time." I'd soothe, trying to smother my face against him again.

Shaking his head, his cock slapping wetly with my saliva to his stomach, he'd beg me, his hands bruising my cheeks and hauling me up, "Are you?"

I'd wind around him and beg him to enter me, his penis seated, slick, against me, "Yes, _Edward yes."_

"Then why are you still here?" Strafing from dulled amber to midnight, his eyes were always hungry, ready for sex and taste and plunder, and doubting himself.

I wanted to slap him.

"I could have told you to fuck off, you know," I would punch his ribs and then cradle the contusion already forming.

He'd kiss my hand and place my palm over the cavern of his chest, "I'm not alive, Isabella." His mouth would always turn down. His eyes as well. Like Lake Michigan, the surface he'd skated upon as a boy, I'd skitter across him, kiss him with a bare brush, chaste and purity and golden and tears and drinking and giving his soul back to him, "_You are alive. I exist. I am here."_

_I could never tell Edward 'no'._

"I want," his face a portrait of hatred, "to taste your blood, all the time."

I'd felt as though I'd been slapped by the truth.

An ignoble veracity that had hurtled away my childhood fancies in one brutal admission.

The quiet conversations I'd had with the silent photograph to a beautiful, soulful human face whose expression of joy and aloofness bordered my every hope. The memories I'd created from nothing more than fables and wishes and cotton candy, and then, later, the most juvenile ideas of romance.

The long-lasting nights in December as every year I aged while I laid beneath our Christmas tree with its pricklish needles layering dots into my skin and the play of yellow, blue, and red and green from the bulbs strobing against ornaments I'd fashioned and strings of popcorn and cranberries Renee and I'd spent hours making. At the top, high above me, sat an angel whose feathery wings spread, whose halo glowed, whose smile divinely promised me.

_Light in the dark._

Sugar-spun plum confections and his plummy voice and his pouting, puckish mouth.

I _saw_ him. I didn't _dream_ him. I _knew _him, I needed him; first as a playmate, then a confidante, now a lover.

And yet he could kill me.

Over the years, Charlie had grown more stern, stentoriously rebuking me, "Bella, you're wasting your time."

He'd tutted and I'd stomped my foot and stood up to my dad and unleashed a fury, "I am not _wasting away_. I'm not whiling away, I'm not _dying_ or lingering or pretending to be anything I'm not." I'd swallowed my venom and pouched to the couch, "I'm okay, Dad."

He'd stopped colluding with me.

The final time we'd spoken of Edward had been the week before I started school in Forks. On the living room floor with the haze of the weak Washington Indian summer sun creating crosshatches over the picture that had been folded and smushed and always honored, my dad had motioned for me to pass him the remote control, "You know how old that thing is, right?" He flicked on the television and gestured to Edward and the young girl.

I sighed and smiled, ever the speaker of the obvious was Charlie, "Yes, of course."

He'd sat forward with his elbows to his knees, cracking his brawny knuckles before settling his chin to his folded hands, "So, if he's still 'with us'," one of his famous colloquialisms made me laugh quietly and turn to face him, "you understand he's-"

I'd cut him off, "Dead, or immortal, or something we've never met before."

Slouching, rubbing his belly, he'd shaken his head in negation but worried his lip with his final word on the matter, "You're too much like your mother."

The fondness that lit his eyes hadn't been lost on me.

_I was a Higgin, through and through._

And Edward, he was a vampire.

Now I knew.

And the reason he hadn't deigned to speak to me, look at me, touch me, or know me when we'd collided like a cosmic boom in that tiny classroom of teenagers surrounding our intensified meeting, the smell of sweat and bleach burning my nose overridden by his flighty scent of cut-grass and cedar and man and boy and deliriously tasty sweetness was because _he'd really fucking wanted to kill me._

_La tua cantante._

That was me to him.

His singer, his caller, his swan song.

Only ever _his_ Isabella.

And him, a killer who had massacred others.

A man who drank blood.

Blood whose beguiling perfume had nothing on mine, to him.

He'd wanted to tear me asunder, crush my neck and spill my innards and drink of me and feast on me…

And love me.

_A gruesome banquet._

I'd denied him. Pushing against his chest, desperately whispering, "You'd have ended my life already, Edward, if you were going to."

His head had sloped to my shoulder and his words were breathy acquisitions I'd held to my winged heart, "Yes," his acceptance made his body heavyover mine. The merest wonderment widened the landscape of his most gorgeous face, "I love you more than that, Isabella."

I'd blushed and brought him flush to me, aching… _always aching_ for closer, harder, hotter, colder, _now, now, now._ Especially when he called me Isabella. When we were alone, when we were quiet, when we were fucking, when we were love-making, even with just our hands and eyes caressing.

It was something he'd remembered, one of those few keepsakes from his other life; his father had always used his mother's Romany appellation as an intimate name to keep sacrosanct; _a love note_. She'd been Eliza to Edward John, yet Elizabeth to the world at large.

Life and death entwined, killing and fucking rolled into one… from our very disparate beings, everything about us was a duality at odds… _but we worked._

For, surely, we were meant to be.

For the ages.

A love story.

"The Glorious Ameoba," Banner brought me back to present with his single-cell presentation. I stifled a laugh, Edward watched me questioningly. I shook my head. How could I explain that Banner probably still lived at home with his mommy, a thirty-seven year old wunderkind teaching in the hell of high school, and ever inhabiting his own single cell boyhood bedroom.

_And I bet Newton had an amoeba-dick. A teeny, tiny, one-celled, one-eyed pale worm._

I was thankful for the silence of my mind to Edward's.

And I'd effectively splatted my ever-present chick-wood for Edward.

The screech of chalk to blackboard and the smell of its white powder sent curlings of dust against me and Edward as we pretended to be oblivious to each other. A sifting of blanched grains rained over my hand. It caused a glitter in the sun breaking through clouds and finding its meandering way through the thick windows of Forks High.

On Edward's open palm, the pulverized crumbs blended with his flesh.

A spark from the glitter dust caught his eye as it nestled to the corner of my mouth, and he raised a finger to release it, his eyes hooded and lowering to the push of my tits in my t-shirt.

He halted midway and licked from the median to the bend of his own lips instead.

_I gasped and fell into a dream of that tongue, with its wet, smooth texture, taking in both my nipples as he'd pushed my breasts up and together._

_Was he a boy? Was he a man? Was a vampire? Tortured, destined to solitude? All those things._

_Alone no longer._

_Not with me._

He moved me with his unerring, supernatural, supernal looks, a covetous arcane dance to his dipped-in-molten-gold eyes. Beneath the lab table, his wide hand, his long fingers stroked between mine. Otherwise, he didn't move. I could tell he was watching Banner with one eye, me with the other.

I placed my hair behind my ear, giving him access to my profile, the side of my wanton smile as his fingers dipped and caressed all over mine.

Every touch an ignition setting my belly to flames, making my legs open and my back arch.

In response, he pushed his other hand to his crotch, and I knew the exact smoothness of his erection as it hardened; a silky, sumptuous wet dream.

I knew, _I knew,_ all these things about Edward Anatolia Masen.

How did I know?

_Edward was my spirit._

_He'd been so gentle, our first time. Not so much the four times after. But there'd been kindling at first, and kindness. It had blazed out of control, into a wildfire with flares of blue and orange and Phoenix-carnelian flapping up and over and annihilating all thought with its conflagrating path. _

_He'd been knowing, as he'd accepted my virginity, but his hands trembled. Edward had soldered us together as his gloriously imbued cock had wound a lover's dance inside of my body. _

_We were like that other fantastical bird, the gryphon, to mate__only once, forever._

'_Til death._

_Around his ropey throat, plummeting to his chest, smacking against his purely deific muscles was that ring as he'd ridden upon me. When he'd lapped my tits, the diamond had slipped into my belly button. As I'd bowed and cried against him with my voice and my flesh, it had hit the underside of my chin so I'd grabbed it and hauled him closer, the gem digging into my palm, and his face a mess of screaming, howling, existential_ YES!

_Twining the chain like braid to my fingers, I'd laughed through my own whimpers and pleading,_ "Please, baby, please. Fuck. FUCK! God, yes, Edward. Yes Edward!"

_More._

_That jewel was his history._

"_Your mother's ring," I'd stated, because who else's could it have been?_

_She had given us each other._

She'd known.

_The stamped gold on his pinky was his father's. The Masen Family crest. An armored knight's head aloft on Corinthian blue leaves, plumes, and a royal cerulean gryphon-lion in standard pose on his hind legs… to battle._

_I'd kissed that too._

_His parents stolen from him, his life turned over with the tines of pitchfork fangs punctuating his veins with a final essence of humanity by Carlisle, Edward had been released. To me._

To youth without age.

_Unlike the Phoenix, the reborn bird of prey, the place I'd grown up, he hadn't had to wait two hundred years to make ashes, to find everlasting, to die and rebirth and discover me._

_Only eighty-seven years __more._

_I choked on the pain he must have felt, all the time._

_I was sickened thinking about it._

_I was horrified to understand I was his only one,_ ever_._

All that fucking time!

And the flames licked and curled, cured and healed, and every passing day was embossed further on my own mortal escape.

Now, I knew him.

Now, I understood him.

Now, I felt more unsatisfied.

Because every minute, hour, day, month was taking me on the path away from Edward.

_I would die._

He would remain.

_He could NEVER die._

My makeup was against us. My biology.

Even our chemistry wouldn't be enough to safeguard us through the obstacle course of my mortal life.

A rampant hinterland of harrowing realization made me suck in my breath.

_How could we ever be?_

I threw a gasp out, coiled down to the worktop and scratched, "I want to be with you."

It wasn't sex, it was connection.

And, _okay_, it _was _sex_._

_But more than that, belonging to him, owning him, being his, giving me him, joining for the time I had left._

Suddenly, Fate was a motherfucking whore.

I hated that bitch.

His penmanship arced over mine, "Yes."

_Affirmation._

Smoldering coals beneath glowing embers. I wanted him to claim me again. I wanted to mark him with my aroma, _my scat_. I wanted to kick the shins of all the pathetic girls eyefucking my man, I was beaten through with the violent tendency to scratch their eyes out, push down his jeans just enough to unleash his resplendent shaft, and sit myself atop him in one of the molded plastic classroom chairs… in front of everyone, so they'd know; Edward Cullen was MINE.

_I tried to watch my mouth around him, but I just wasn't that innocent, and try though he might, neither was he._

_He'd been around the block a time, or two thousand._

Looking for me.

_His eyes blackened every time I said_ fuck. _Watching the shape of my lips plumping over that curse, he invariably sucked in a deep breath, his pupils dilated, his body shifted from feigned nonchalance to complete arousal… a dense, soupy fog of lust swam between us._

_Still he didn't fuck me again, not yet, not since our first night of gluttony. As if he'd trespassed the mores of his earlier times in making love to me._

_I hadn't complained._

_Waking in the night, shaking with want, never from the cooling duvet of his sinewy, naked body rolled against me, I'd pocketed his hard-on between my thighs and slithered against it._

_Lazily, Edward had reclined with his hands behind his neck, watching me and jerking up to every touch and lip-smack against his nipples, his shoulders, his hipbones, the arrow of muscle leading beneath sheets to his cock._

_Looking up as I'd skipped over his cock, laughing with me-his jollity a raspy thing, mine enamored—as it levitated closer to my fingers that only touched the air between us, Edward had finally grabbed my hands with a snarl, and joined them with his own over his cold-hot, iron-forged dick._

_After he'd cum, starting to unleash in my mouth until I'd pushed his jetting erection with its cold fume to my tits, leaving a trail of glistening white on my breast, I'd cradled Edward's head, "Let me tell you a bedtime story."_

_As if one with me, Mother Nature rattled the windows with her tempestuous winds and tree limbs and thunder-cracks booming._

_The lights went out._

_Edward had linked all our limbs, bedding us safely from the torrential downpour._

_Smoky, satiated, I'd started, "You showed me yours, so I'm going to show you mine."_

_He'd laughed so his chest rippled against mine, packing us more closely together, "Fair trade, Isabella. I'll definitely show you more, and more, until you can't see straight."_

_Swiping aside his fingers lifting my nipples and making my breath an ill-escaped thing again, I'd reprimanded, "That's not what I was referring to, baby."_

But as she gazed at him she pitied him and said:

'Welcome, my handsome prince. What do you seek here?'"

"I seek Youth without Age and Life without Death.

_I'd silted up his body and meshed my curves to his planes, "Remember?"_

_Bracketing my face in his hands, he'd kissed me until my thighs widened upon the wealthiness of his ever-hard erection, and Edward's raspy words rose goose bumps upon chills from my ass to my tits, "Yes, Isabella. Those utterances are tattooed on my soul,_ just like you."

_I had to remove myself from the power of his presence, just a bit. Sitting up, I'd crossed my legs and his eyes had made landfall to my slit._

_I'd clasped his biceps, bringing his look to mine. Tussling his hair and brushing it off his forehead, even though it immediately flopped forward again, untamed as him when he let go, I'd begun. "My mom told this tale to me every night. It's a feud, a fairytale. The Black Dutch and the Romany."_

_A candle was lit and its dance was the pedal of a piano pressed down over notes, soft and flickering._

_Lushly attentive, Edward had rolled to his elbow, cutting the air above me with his distractingly sensual form._

"_You'll know this, baby," I'd been unable to help myself from the heaps of muscles bulging in his arms, I'd stroked him and recited, "She spared their lives out of pure pleasure, for she had never before seen a human being. Restraining the savage beasts, she soothed them, and sent them back to their haunts. She was a tall, slender, lovely fairy, quite too beautiful. When the young hero saw her, he stood still as though turned to stone." _

_Youth without Age, Life without Death; Edward's story was a counterpoint to my own Teutonic heritage. Embroiled, linked from opposite ends of the spirit realm. _

_He'd been given, I could take._

_We Higgins knew this._

_Coupling with me, Edward had raised my knee and sunk inside of me so I'd felt not just the purchase of his swollen tip raising me from the bed, but the expanse and ridges roping and ribbing with each slow plunge._

"_More."_

Yes, more. Now.

_Slowly, he'd turned me away__and twisted us both until I backed up to his chest, his hands to my tits, his thigh opening me, his dick guided in and out if me, my ass pounding against his pelvis and his sac hitting the sensitive bridge from pussy to pucker._

_After it all, the celestial stop of time bearing nothing but our halting, seized bodies, I'd melted to the stack of pillows, shoving aside a singularly annoying cushion, I'd tipped, _"_Amongst the Germans there were beautiful fairy princesses who stood apart from the hourglass of time, housed in their glass palace like it was an unbreakable coffin in which they breathed and lived but never aged, and the moat swimming around it tasted of the Fountain of Youth, there was told a folk story of a Teutonic family of fair maidens. The Higgin clan. It was said their touch disarmed the passage of time, and ceased its clip-clopping motion."_

_From his nightstand, I'd brought out the photograph._

_Grabbing it from me, he'd rolled aside and sat up. His back a straight line, his hair too long, almost, to be that youth._

"_That's me!" Edward had exclaimed._

_I claimed him with my ripeness all over him, my legs around his waist, my hands to his shoulders, "Yes."_

"_And the girl…" he'd bent closer, following all the folds and wrinkles I'd left on the picture._

_I could see him searching for her name._

_She, his friend. His playmate, his partner in crime._

"_Lieselotte," I'd kissed his spine. Turning his head to me, I'd matched him. "Lieselotte, Lotte. My great-grandmother."_

_Pulling me atop him, he'd filled me once more with a decadent thrust, "We are here."_

_Tugging at his ears and ruffling along his jaw, I'd gasped, "Yes."  
_

_Could we end time?_

With a scuff on the classroom linoleum Janitor Jenks had polished in the early hours of the morning, causing a nice black mark against dim yellow flooring, I turned my stool toward Edward. He gripped harder to my hand, threaded his fingers through mine, allowing me to tug him a little bit closer so I could whisper in his ear.

A race of flesh jounced his thigh beneath our plaited fingers when my nose grazed his earlobe. I was so hungry, _greedy_, to lap him up.

In slow motion, his lips turned up into a hard curl, showing me his desire, an animalistic thing he nearly always held in check. His eyelids shuttered down gently so the swoop of his lashes feathered shadows over his high cheekbones. I ran along his jaw, mesmerized by the glassy surface, ghosting such fine skin, hard bone, ligature that jumped and clenched with my knowing caress.

"Your lips are nice," I insinuated into the sleek shell of his ear.

Edward pushed my hand down his leg and then pulled it up, pushed it over, so I clasped the ridge of muscle padding his inner thigh. His eyes creased; his smile was sly and enthralled, his breathing shallow, "_Shhhh._ Banner's onto you."

"Is he?" With Edward watching, I looked to the overweight, overworked, underpaid, flatulent, flaccid ass teacher with his short tortoise neck and tonsure of greasy hair. He had his cirrosis eyes on me. I scribbled hashmarks in my notebook and grinned back at him, batting my eyelashes guilelessly. _Harumphing, _reddening around his gills, Banner strolled back to the chalkboard, unleashing me from his overbearing scrutiny.

"You don't play fair, Bella." It was an undertone, a rough lick of words to my cheek too close to the corner of my lips that pulsed to feel his again.

Dropping my pen with a whoosh to the lined pages on our desktop, I raised my fingertips to Edward's mouth, my own was parted for his… _just his breath, I would take just his breath._ He made me hungry, horny, salacious, I just wanted to touch him! Perfect bloody mouth. The neat curve that had sucked on my clitoris, sluiced over every bare inch of my body, tickled to the side and opened wide enough to allow his tongue, a shard, to tip through. To touch my skin. To jolt my tummy. To make me burn with passion.

_Burn._

_Like Edward had, like his other mother, Esme had. Like his sire and father and friend, Carlisle had._

_And Rosalie, and Emmett, and Jasper, and Alice._

_So many… so much… _pain_._

_All I incensed under was lust and the predilection for his body, the desperation for his heart to beat again or mine to cease its whallop-thunder-beat_ _leaving me as dead as he. All I folded beneath was this unrestrained need to be forever with him. _

_A concentration so narrowed there was only the two of us and the endless, endless pull, pull, pull and pounce to be as goddamn close as possible._

_To consecrate that hallowed ground over which he'd walked for too long, to remember his mother and father and his boyhood, to see him smile and shed his fossilized skin of depression and despair._

I worried my fingernails against the rough, dark indigo of his jeans with my concern about the future.

_Through the lax jigsaw of our arms and legs and lips and cock and pussy and wet with cum and trying to avoid the damp spots on the bedding and lips kissing everywhere and fingers finding each unaddressed piece of skin and digging in and sliding out and asses to the air and growls, hisses,_ kisses, kisses, kisses,_ hips grinding, slipping, my sweat, his toxin, our anecdotal love, our anecdotes released on sighs and mumbles and refrains_ and _I'd sat above him. My knees to the side, my swaying tits fucked by his mouth, his dick sliding in and out of my cunt, "I always left a light on."_

_Squeezing my waist, he'd craned his neck up gracefully to speak against me, "Did you now?"_

_Feeling light as a wisp of cattail fluff, I'd suspended myself over his precious heavy penis, my hands at his abdomen, my puff of breath swallowed by Edward,_ "Always_. In my room. A candle."_

_He'd slowly undulated up into me until I whimpered,_ "_Every night, every night, Edward_." _With his hair in my fists, I let the tears fall against his neck so they pooled in the hollows of his throat._

_Always, there'd been light._

_It had been so quiet, his lips taking each teardrop to his mouth, ingesting my paroxysm__**, **__"You were the one hope that kept me… alive."_

_Alive._

_Dead._

Together.

Bound… in fuckin' mind numbing AP Biology, in Forks, Washington, Edward raked, "My lips are nice?" His eyes were ingots. He'd hunted in the night while I'd tangled and turned in my bed, twisting my hips against my hand, slithering my fingers from my tits to my slit, wanting something, anything, inside of me.

I nodded and smiled, crazed to get my hands on him, naked.

"Are they now?" he wrote in my notepad.

I poked my index finger into his mouth just up to my first knuckle, bruised my hand under his leg, grappling the cliff of sinew. When the shockwaves shaled around my wet lips, I pulled my finger out, snookered it over my own. To taste him. Against his ear again, a throaty wish, "Well, they're very pretty, Edward."

He swallowed a laugh as his eyes widened the size of gold dollars. An arched eyebrow, one I'd painted with my tongue, raised the ante, and I blushed a bit but held my course, "Very pretty, Edward. So pretty, in fact, they make me want to do _unspeakable_ things to them, have you do _unmentionable_ things with them."

He sheared the eraser off his pencil. "_Fuck me_, Isabella." The penny strands of his hair flittered against my neck, and I hooked my leg over his.

The eraser hit the back of beastly bitchy Jessica's head.

And stuck to her hairsprayed ponytail.

He lifted my chin. Edward slunk his mouth half an inch from mine. Muttering, quiet, "You can kiss them."

"Can I?" I blinked, all pretense of innuendo coalescingintoreparation, rebirth—the classroom, the fat fuck skank-ass teacher, the nonessential students all expelled. The room became background noise, my head nodded in his hold, my eyes wanting to linger at the juncture of his jeans and my entire body pulled in that direction. Spreading his legs, Edward angled my stool with his foot and yanked me, silently, closer.

Our legs brushed, twined like coarse hemp, his dick between us.

He had a handful of my shirt at the waist, and a tight grip on three more pencils, perfectly sharpened, the tips reflecting the flintiness of his stare.

I felt the quaking between our bodies to be so near, not really allowed to touch, _not here. _

"Can I?" My mouth met his cheek lightly. His eyes shut. He nodded.

"Here?"

"Yes, please," he groaned.

I placed my knee against the zipper of his pants. The throb of his erection jerked and strived outward. _If he wanted me as much as I did him, what had he been waiting for?_

Now an unbearable need to fuck him, right here, was making me primitive!

_I remembered the morning, six days ago, the last time he'd been inside of me, above me, hanging onto to the acute masculine need for me to orgasm one more time before he'd allow his cock to spill its frosty seed inside me, even though I'd already cum more than I could count on all my fingers and even my toes, painted a silly banana yellow. _

Leaning over, I snuck a sweet kiss over his lips, as if we were courting lovers, bound by society, in his time, in the early 1900's.

Edward looked feverish. His bullion eyes were bright. The carnal ravenousness of his look made me flush.

_Did he want to woo me? Did he need to make to the first move? Did he feel constrained by outdated traditions?_

Damn sure I'd fucking marry him, if that's what he needed to keep this thing corporeal, _alive__**.**_

_Were we, essentially, ill-fated?_

_Did he know this? Is that why he held his body apart from mine?_

He needed to play. To let loose. To love. _To forget and to remember and to forge ahead. Preferably nude, for days on end._

Stealing forward, stealthily and mute, I throttled the moan in my throat and clipped his bottom lip with my teeth, shaking my head just a bit.

In heat.

The crisp crack of slim wood butted in. Those three pencils were halved clean through.

I handed Edward another from my backpack, letting my hair drift down his legs as I did so.

He clenched his fist around the No. 2. I checked Banner's position. Nudged Edward's groin with my knuckles, watched the skin of his fingers tighten and blanch around the pencil, "Shall I tell you what I want to do?"

From somewhere in the room of adolescents came a fake– _cough-get-a-room-cough._

It made not a dent in my haze.

"Yes, Isabella." Edward stroked my legs up and down with precision until my ass came clean off the stool, and I almost lost the train of my thought.

_Almost._

I clutched his neck, curling my fingers against him, flaking from empty vein to the sensual striations of his skin. He moaned and tilted to my touch. I berated, "Don't destroy that pencil, Edward, it's my last one."

He grinned.

I cajoled, with my words, my voice, my stoking, "_I want to pop open your pants, take out your erection, work your shirt over your head. I want to bring up my skirt, pull down my top, undo my bra. I want to shove aside my panties and sit on your lap. I want to have you, here, now, against this table. Over it, under it, on the stool. I really need to feel you inside me again, Edward."_

He bit his bottom lip so as not to yell.

He broke my last fucking pencil.

I needed Edward to let me love him.

"Let me love you, _every where, every way."_

The bell rang.

We remained seated.

The tension between us platinum chains. Unbreakable.

Everything else was false, fake, a mirage, a waste of time.

_Time was not to be wasted. There was too little left._

We were foretold.

Even his mother knew it.

Both of them.

Eliza Anatolia… Eliza Anthony… Elizabeth Masen

Esme Snider… EsmeEvanson… Esme Cullen**.**

He was loved.

Edward Anatolia Masen. Edward Anthony Masen Cullen.

And now he knew it.

"What now?" I asked, wrapped up in him. His arms forming a luscious manly blissfulness about me. Once more in his bed**. **High school forgotten.

_We were so old._

_We were so young._

Our essence had mangled the bedsheets and propelled his parents and siblings from the manse, _finally, _once more.

Edward pulled one of the many pillows off the floor. We'd tossed every damn cushion and piece of clothing and armor and sheets and amour to the woven carpet raped bare in furrows where his bedstead had jolted way too fucking hard with our love-making.

Punching the pillow to the shape of his head and dragging me to the welcoming, wishful home of his chest and tum and abs, he slicked damp tresses from my face and fancied over my sexed-to-hell-and-back hair, "Can we just date?"

_Normality._

_Together._

"A girl and a boy?" my elbows didn't make a dent against him as I rose.

"Nothing more." His smile was so _freed._

It made me grin, and joke, "'Just dating' implies no fucking."

A shade of impudent longing winged deadly across his eyes, lifted up another feast of wide wantonness in his cock, troving into my belly.

Rolling me over, Edward laughed and settled, seated and entered me and lunged a slow, soft-hard-deep-light-dark need, "In that case…"

Still, later, I woke and wound about him.

He tucked inside me smoothly so I only moved with his worshipping lunges.

Half sleepy, I wiped his face with my kisses, "You know, there _is_ something typically teenager we could do."

His pace relaxed to a sexy simper fully in and out of me with every rugged shading of his cock escaping me, owning me… his head filled out my pussy and pushed against the tightest recesses, "Is there now, _Isabella_?"

The moment he climaxed, grabbing me, making me, having me, loving me, he froze in a sturdy vision of _all that was mine._

Sent over, I hardly regained the ability to think before I remembered, "My Dad's waiting to meet you."

He looked crestfallen and so adorably adolescent.

And I cleaned up the spill of our lust with my fingers, my tongue while he watched and wondered over my words, "Should I be scared?"

Allowing the slip of our creamy blend to saturate my mouth, I mentioned nonchalantly, "Well, he does have a gun," I sipped my lips against the underside of his majestic bicep, "And he knows you're a vampire."

* * *

~I'll be interested in your thoughts on Bella, and the way the story is shaping up~

_The Phoenix Bird, _Hans Christian Andersen:

hca(DOT)gilead(DOT)org(DOTil/phoenix(DOT)html

Lutheran bible:

cyberbrethren(DOT)com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/luther(DOT)bible(DOT)1545(DOT)L(DOT)jpg

Mud Pies and Other Recipes: A Cookbook for Dolls:

crookedhouse(DOT)typepad(DOT)com/crookedhouse/2008/04/mud-pies-and-ot(DOT)html

Cheers,

Rie~


	9. Nest

Much love to my beauteous and brilliant betas, Viola Cornuta and Vanessarae!

Disclaimer: Mine, mine, mine. (Well…sort of and also not really).

The italicized passages are from specific fairy tales, and each passage is marked.

~~Enjoy~~

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Nine: Nest**

**Renee Higgin Swan**

_The poor girl thought, "I can no longer stay here. I will go and seek my brothers." And when night came, she ran away, and went straight into the forest. She walked the whole night long, and next day also without stopping, until she could go no farther for weariness. Then she saw a forest-hut, and went into it, and found a room with six little beds, but she did not venture to get into one of them, but crept under one, and lay down on the hard ground, intending to pass the night there. Just before sunset, however, she heard a rustling, and saw six swans come flying in at the window. They alighted on the ground and blew at each other, and blew all the feathers off, and their swan's skins stripped off like a shirt. Then the maiden looked at them and recognized her brothers, was glad and crept forth from beneath the bed. The brothers were not less delighted to see their little sister, but their joy was of short duration. "Here canst thou not abide," they said to her. "This is a shelter for robbers, if they come home and find thee, they will kill thee."_

"_But can you not protect me?" asked the little sister. "No," they replied, "only for one quarter of an hour each evening can we lay aside our swan's skins and have during that time our human form; after that, we are once more turned into swans." The little sister wept and said, "Can you not be set free?"_

"_Alas, no," they answered, "the conditions are too hard! For six years thou mayst neither speak nor laugh, and in that time thou must sew together six little shirts of starwort for us. And if one single word falls from thy lips, all thy work will be lost." And when the brothers had said this, the quarter of an hour was over, and they flew out of the window again as swans._

From _The Six Swans, _Grimm's Fairy Tales

Charlie called me, his throaty voice always both a lullaby and a damn porn movie, "She's met _him._"

"What?" I sat back on my couch and turned down the music and mused over whether or not to pour a double of whiskey.

"He's here, _Renee,"_ I couldn't stop the vibrant chills that blanketed my skin with his resounding and rough exhalation of my name.

"He?"

"You need to come home," Charlie told me, and it was that Police Chief tone he knew always got to me; forceful.

"If it's just another boyfriend, Charlie…" I scattered off, punching the cushions and feeling for my lighter.

"He's not a _boy."_

I choked and sat up and spluttered, "He's there?"

I could feel him nodding, smiling at my surprise, probably damn grinning too, "Yeah, _baby_, he's here." When he called me baby I felt all… _God_, I felt completely enfolded in his strong arms, both safe and satisfied and wanton. "We need you home."

_Home._

I suppose I'd always been worried about stopping along the way, of becoming frozen, of being starved of new sights and sounds.

Of being stuck in the mud. Unless I was knees deep in that shit at an alternative folk festival, _then life was good._

Born of parents who'd come of age in the Hippy Era with smoke-filled ideas of Woodstock, pot, bell-bottoms, and the _notion_ of Free Love, I was second generation Mamas and Papasmaterial. And all that LSD had a lot to answer for.

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. My folks, Helen and Thomas, had met at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967.

I'd been conceived within the month.

Upon my birth, Helen had her own rebirth… reincarnating herself as _Heaven._

I'd wanted to be like my _oma_, Lotte. A Traveler, she'd never settled, making a home from a caravan with fluttery curtains and pots of Black-Eyed-Susans she scooped up from meadows when 'this land was your land'. The living was hard as baked earth, yet you'd never know it, not from the stories told. It was nothing, back then, to carry a _kleines Kind _full-term while working the midways, then take to your tiny bed, give birth, and hit the road again with a newborn suckling your teat. That's how my oma and my mom had come to this earth. Me? I debuted in this world in the back of the ubiquitous V-Dub van, a gathering of self-taught midwives cooing, coaxing, and coaching, and was delivered straight into the rough, odd-jobs hands of my dad.

The movement may have died down, but throughout North and South America, pockets of beatniks and folds of flower children still set up farms, made a living from the land, and welcomed the rootless and rode-hard to their communes.

Grown of gypsy stock, I was a counterculture girl of the 70s and 80s. Everything was rosy and right, and at odds with the threat of capitalism and materialism. Generous, giving, making do… _and a hell of a lot of making out_.

Moving on for me was like the current of the ocean to a person living ten yards away from the surf. An untamable need. A natural desire. The thing that soothed me.

My upbringing made me scorn the idea of making a stationary home, _a nest_, filling it with my offspring, being tethered to the perch of credit cards and purchases and keeping up with the Joneses.

_Who among us doesn't judge?_

Pipe dreams.

A fucking lot of bongs.

I had hit the road, done the whole Jack Kerouac thing… _spread my love around._ Then I'd met Charlie.

Heaven and Thomas had seen me off from the flat tundra of Nebraska where they were working on the idea of corn-for-fuel and raising alpaca to make woolen sweaters sold in the co-ops throughout Omaha come the dreaded plains winter.

I'd waved bye to the chicken coop, rusted red and in need of another repair, gave the peace sign to Mama Solstice, the kibbutz's matriarch in charge, as she opened the lopsided gate for me and shook it closed around the flare of dust chugged up from my four-by-four's tires.

_Free as a bird._

Three months out, I'd hit a little bit of pay-dirt, prowling around the smaller cities of the southwest, busking on the curb and taking a set or two in the grungier bars populating university towns.

Crawling steadily north and west, I'd heard about the Burning Man ritual in San Francisco. Figuring I would make a giant loop and hit Baker Beach in time for the nocturnal, tribal, radical jubilation, I'd made a few bucks working the harvests alongside the immigrants, sold some hand-embellished woolen satchels, and learned how to haul up Alaskan King crab on a trawler where it was still cold as hell, even at the beginning of summer.

I usually asked for food or gas.

The rare times I had some dollars to spare, I'd stock up on cigarettes and cheap plonk, then sit out in a deserted field, make a fire, tuck inside my sleeping bag and watch the shooting stars chasing after one another.

I usually had a companion.

On my way to Burning Man up in the willy-wacks of Washington, my desperately patched-up pick-up had throttled on fumes other than the cigarette I'd held out the rolled-down window, my hair catching the wind and billowing out before stranding in front of my eyes. Jamming the clutch, listening to the groan of pistons slowing their thrust, hearing my tires crunch over onto the deep gravel of the soft shoulder, I put her in park and jumped down, stubbing my cig out on the wayside.

I opened the hood and watched the wet plumes curl right up around the mist of this muggy day, as if each trail was an apparition guiding the feather-ended fog off to Nirvana.

With nothing to do but wait for my engine to cool down, I'd tried the radio but received nothing but a deadened _click-click._

In sandals and a long, layered, peasant skirt, an off-shoulder blouse, rows of beads and my fingers bleeding with Bakelite rings and carved wooden amulets hanging down the snug hills of my cleavage, I'd opened my arms to the wondrous afternoon rainshower that hit gently, suddenly.

There'd been nothing but green out here, trees for miles and miles. Mother Nature's Paradise. That rainstorm had been the best shower I'd had in three days! Dancing, getting more and more drenched, I'd alternately kicked at the truck's tires and kicked up my heels. Lifting my skirts, I'd toed out my legs to catch each lick, every fresh teardrop. Heedless of any crisis, happy to just _be._

Just as I'd opened the beribboned neck of my top and pulled the sleeves far down over my shoulders, a tall shadow had punctuated my own personal storm… looming closer than the forest. Gleeful with careless laughter, I'd looked at him.

The tan, tall, dark, delicious vision before me stopped me mid-sway. Rugged and hewn seemingly from the very Redwoods guarding over us, he'd looked equally cool and shy and manly and boyish.

Thrust in his pockets, his fingers had jingled coins that clattered just a bit louder than the _plip-plop_ of rain dropping to soil around us. The firm, full line of his lips tugged up one side jestingly, and pulled the other half down sexily. Woven together, his eyebrows created a harsh line above frowning, full, brown eyes.

It looked like he was gnawing his inner lip, the way his jaw jumped and clenched.

All I had seen were lean, long legs in slacks that melted to the rough muscles of his thighs, plastered the zipper to a long, thick hill beneath, and his shirt wettened to muscles and shoulders and breadth and strength.

He'd been staring at my tits. Couldn't say I'd blamed him… I was soaked through; he'd been able to see everything. _And I mean everything because, well, I'd lost my bras about three thousand miles ago_.

I'd paused and considered palming my boobs, just to see what he'd do.

Probably call me ma'am or something, even though he appeared my age.

I had shimmied a bit, and grinned when he'd gulped and stuttered, "You need a hand, Miss?"

_Boy, did I ever._

We'd made small talk while he'd puttered about my truck and made it semi-roadworthy once more.

He's been on his way home from the Police Academy**.**_He was going to be an Officer of the Law._ I'd laughed and watched a beautiful blush rise up from the open collar of his standard issue shirt, over the strength of his throat to his sharp, clean cheeks.

Slamming down the hood, he had become much more vehement, and that was when I'd noticed the deep, deadly, kissable cleft in his chin.

_I was a goner._

The faint blue-black of his stubble stippled that strong chin and shadowed his cheeks, and his eyes had lured me in.

With no shyness at all, _Charlie Swan_ had taken my wrist before slipping his fingers down between mine, and it was the sexiest act I'd ever felt.

He bobbed down to my ear, the firelight of his face settling and becoming stern… just like his voice, "Come home with me."

I never made it to San Francisco.

My truck had remained, abandoned by the roadside for four more days.

Instead, I made love to Charlie Swan.

There was nothing like the way he had made me feel grounded and real and ethereal and the scantest wisp of a willow, with his hands on me.

He'd taken me home, dried me off with a threadbare, light blue towel that looked to have been more at home on a washboard than in a Kenmore washer and dryer.

The loops of terrycloth caught on my nipples that simply wouldn't sit down.

With every pass that grew more languid, the aura collided and become denser as Charlie licking his chapped, ruby lips, while watching each unroll of toweling that had pulled my blouse further down my chest.

His head against my thigh, pressing a damp mask of his face to my long cotton skirt, he'd impressed the heel of his palm up against my sex, turning his face he'd groaned, "You feel so good."

The ties loosened, the dress billowing and suctioning to the linoleum, Charlie had starved his brown drake eyes on my undress.

_Pantyless._

"_Oh my God,"_ he'd rasped, along with I-don't-know-how-many-fingers and the prow of his tongue, flattening the soft curls, spreading my lips apart, gathering speed, splicing me open until I'd flattened my back to the melamine worktop and gouged my spine against its edge.

_This_ was a really new, weird sort of reality.

_Or a flashback._

I'd pointed my toes into his ass and ripped open his pants and gasped in delight at the luscious and damp and hot and long cock before me.

He'd blushed, toed off his shoes, and let go his socks.

I'd watched all his sinews ripple with each action.

He was nothing but man when he'd stood up, prising my thighs further apart.

"I can get you back to your truck, or pay for a motel room," I hadn't been able to focus; his dick was working up and down my pussy, his arms shoved right to the side of me, his chest a tense masterpiece of wire, rope, and vein.

His shoulders had bulged, bulky, sexy, beneath my hands.

"I want you."

We'd iced across the tiles, wrapping our fingers around any part we could get hold of.

_Tit, dick, ass, hip, back, balls._

He'd finally wrapped one forearm around my collar bone, took us to the sliding glass door, and ripped the blinds apart so there was nothing but me and him in the mirrored aperture of glass.

To watch his eyes, to range over his rangy form, to _feel_ and see his dick coming in and out of me…I was blinded like a dragonfly, rashed and raised and crazed and cracked and lowering onto him so hard we banged the panes and tore the window coverings down.

_Harder, tighter, closer, better…_

He had stopped on the cusp, muttered insanely, "I should take you to bed."

_The hell?_

Turning in his arms, my ass met glass, my knees keened upon his lithe hips, my hands had hopped from the gloriousness of his chest, and I'd pleaded against his suck-me lips and the dice of his chin, "Fuck. Me."

_Slamming, slipping, grabbing, holding, crying, screaming, cumming._

We made a trail of limbs down the floor-to-ceiling window and sat on its little lip, breathing heavily. Jerking against one another.

_I couldn't stop moving._

_I wouldn't stop moving on._

We had nothing in common, me and Charlie. I suppose that had been the attraction… our utter difference.

I was wrong, he was right.

He was noon, I was night.

And over the few years we stayed married, I'd convinced myself we just couldn't fit.

I was still a singer though.

All the while, I crooned to my man, my husband, _my lover._ With my body.

I'd just never… _I hadn't thought I could ever… _give my heart. Not all the way.

I still made my money singing in blues bars dotted around the country.

I'd met many men.

I'd left Charlie.

_I'd never left Charlie, my first love._

I'd always hated my name—except when groaned-sighed by Charlie as he came, his lips to my ear, my mouth, my tits—so plain, stark, suburban. I'd made sure 'Renee' was the only nondescript thing about me. They could have called me Petal or Sunshine or… Meadow…

So when it came time to give appellation to our child, I knew it should be something to blossom as she would, a name that would grow with her, unfurl around her, something both pretty and strong and visual and _flowering_.

_Isabella._

_My baby Bella was this Edward's singer._

I'd sung to her too, every night.

My daughter.

Our daughter.

I missed her with a keening ache that wrangled throughout me unless I kept busy. So, I was here, and I was there… I went anywhere to be myself… the one that feared the stationery stultifying noose of normalcy.

So I'd thought.

_That_ passion to be different… it had crawled and kicked inside of me until I couldn't stay away anymore… until I couldn't stand myself anymore.

Not like this.

Not alone.

_~~ll~~_

Not a boy, no, definitely not.

Infinitely more dangerous.

_Vampire._

_Mullo._

It didn't matter that Charlie and I were both aware of Bella's binding to the idea of this boy, whose photograph she had, dating back to the early 1900s. Or that the girl he'd been captured beside was none other than my own, _urgrossmutter_, my, Oma Lieselotte.

Possibly any other family would have had their daughter outfitted in a straight jacket and housed in a padded room for such flights of the fantastical.

_Because Bella always knew Edward would come to her._

And we believed her.

It hadn't seemed so far-fetched for me. Not with the ingrained mantra reared inside of me that all people, all time, all nature, all energy was never consumed but simply circulated, rolling around… sometimes weaving and swaying and hitting and meeting, like the carts of a ferris wheel clanking against the skeletal metal scaffolding over which they rotated.

Charlie, well… it made me smile to think of my man accepting this wild and uninvestigated part of Bella, something so completely at odds with reality and the scientific and _a priori_.

He _cherished_ her fanciful spirit, just as he'd done mine.

Against his own rearing**. ** Regardless of the venomous bile Mother Swan vomited toward me, Charlie _believed._

Marie Swan had been an old Mother Goose, far too eager to stick her beak into her only child's love life.

"_The King, however, had a wicked mother who was dissatisfied with this marriage and spoke ill of the young Queen. "Who knows," said she, "from whence the creature who can't speak, comes? She is not worthy of a king!" After a year had passed, when the Queen brought her first child into the world, the old woman took it away from her, and smeared her mouth with blood as she slept. Then she went to the King and accused the Queen of being a man-eater. The King would not believe it, and would not suffer any one to do her any injury. She, however, sat continually sewing at the shirts, and cared for nothing else. The next time, when she again bore a beautiful boy, the false step-mother used the same treachery, but the King could not bring himself to give credit to her words. He said, "She is too pious and good to do anything of that kind; if she were not dumb, and could defend herself, her innocence would come to light." But when the old woman stole away the newly-born child for the third time, and accused the Queen, who did not utter one word of defence, the King could do no otherwise than deliver her over to justice, and she was sentenced to suffer death by fire"~_ _The Six Swans_

I hadn't been accustomed to being watched by unblinking, bleary eyes that spoke volumes of never-waning hate. Showing up at our wedding, _wearing white for God's sake!, _a good twenty minutes late so we'd had to wait to take our nuptials, she'd walked down the aisle, superciliously stopping to greet nearly every guest.

My only revenge, silent though it was, was that I hadn't worn white, but an exceptionally flowing peach-colored frock made up of lace insets and such a low bodice I don't think Charlie even noticed his mother's arrival.

Nor very much of the ceremony, come to think of it.

Until we took our final vows and he'd crushed me to his chest, his hands cupping my face and his lips wandering in a wondrous homage, each kiss deeper and greedier until he'd separated just long enough to breathe, "I love you, Renee Swan."

She'd played on all my insecurities and made me believe… _I wasn't wholesome enough for this man._

When I'd announced my pregnancy, Charlie standing behind me and already beaming like the proud papa he would become, she'd actually crossed herself and sent up a plea to the Heavens.

Charlie'd stepped in front of me to shield me from her quiet, cutting annihilation of my character, "Mother, we are having a baby. _The woman I love, my wife, Renee Higgin Swan, is having my child._ If you want to be part of your grandchild's life, you will never let me see you act this way again. You're a disgrace to yourself." Grabbing my hand, jerking me away at first until he gentled in some outmoded idea of my 'delicate' condition, Charlie had rubbed my belly as he'd taken me from the house.

I felt even worse over his standing up for me, knowing a rift was forming with me as the wedge.

She hadn't let Charlie see her act that way again.

_Only me._

Often enough that my morning sickness had increased in her pus-filled presence.

Meditating, music, yoga, ginger, a wealth of herbal teas… nothing could counteract the plague she heaped upon me.

Upon hearing of my plan for a midwife and waterbirth, Mother Marie Swan had literally grabbed a bottle from her Blessed Mother statuette and sprinkled the 'Holy Water' on me, as if to wash out the sin of my existence.

I'd always been damned in her mind, and damaging to her boy.

I had no desire to be _that_ kind of mother-in-law.

_But a vampire was far worse than a hippie, right?_

A _Mullo._

A gypsy vampire.

I'd heard of his kind in stories told that were less like fairy tales and more akin to horror stories.

Manes of glorious hair to the ground, a preoccupation with hedonism, which had never seemed a bad thing in my book… and probably wasn't in Bella's either… _shit!_ Killing, sucking, fucking, and drinking blood.

_That_ was a _Mullo._

I'd shrieked over the phone to Charlie, knowing damn well he was holding the receiver a good foot away from his ear, "Don't you tell me you've let her shack up with him!"

"No, but-"

"No buts, Mister." I'd torn into my bedroom and started packing a carryall, "I'll be there tomorrow."

_~~ll~~_

I breezed into the ragged, clapboard house without knocking.

I know I should have made my presence known first, but it felt like coming home.

Back to the place I'd left, a churlish, young woman-mother-loner with her toddler in tow.

Home was an idea I'd shirked off. Like snakeskin.

Yet it always grew back… _home._

I should have knocked because there was my daughter wrapped around a young man on the same damn couch, springs pinging with their groping motions, the threadbare fabric the very stuff I'd sat upon; nursing her, humming to her, alternately rubbing her bottom and patting her soft-as-talc baby back. Fluff wedged out of a recent tear in the dark brown material, hung with their huffing breaths, and then floated to the carpet.

It wasn't that Charlie was a layabout. It was that he was a man _content._

As I'd never been.

And I envied him that peace.

"Bella," I'm sure my voice was cooler than I wanted it to be. Warring between worry for her well-being and motherly satisfaction to simply be in the same room as my sweet daughter, I frowned and looked away as they untangled themselves like the smooth, transparent, fishing thread I was certain still took up at least one drawer in Charlie's kitchen.

"Mom!" Catching me off guard, she ran at me and filled my soul with the brightest, laughing light… _as always._

But this, this was something more.

She was… _glowing._

Just like that newborn babe she'd been.

Fresh and new and… _oh Goddammit, she was so completely in love._

I curled her into my arms and rocked my baby back and forth and just felt her.

Even though it had only been a couple months, it felt like years since I'd had my daughter in my arms.

Streams of tears wet both our faces as I steadied us apart and studied her. Puffy lips from a searing make out session: _check._ Flushed cheeks from being under the spell of a man-vampire-Mullo: _check._ Wide smile and excited look filling her eyes from brown to brilliant tiger-eyes: _check._

"Mommy," she whispered.

I kissed her forehead, reliving the first time she'd called me that at just over a year old, inhaled the scent of her that had never been more than the memory of those Midwestern fields I'd worked the summer I met Charlie.

Exhaling, I took her under my shoulder, because even if she'd met the supernatural love of her life, I was still at least an inch taller than her, and her mother.

So I could do this shit.

Keep her under my wing.

Just for now.

_Maybe._

Making sure my posture was straight, I looked up over this man-creature who'd positioned himself in Bella's life from the first time she'd seen his likeness.

Well, he was very handsome; I'd give her that. And tall, tall was good. In fact, he was distractingly beautiful, as a copper penny—something his burnished, wild locks put me in mind of—sitting at the bottom of a fountain, winking in the midday sun, begging you to reach in and-

From beneath the water, I heard Bella introduce us, "Mom, this is Edward Cullen," from under the haze I was washed over with the pride, pleasure in her voice. "_Edward_," even just saying his name, her voice gave out a ray of love so strong and true it pierced the fountain's splashing to hook me, "this is my mother, Renee Higgin Swan."

"Petal," I mentioned.

"Mom?" Bella waved her hand in front of my face, and I awoke as if spluttering from a dead man's float.

"Uh, yeah… Petal… I always thought I should have been named that, Renee being so boring and stuff." My embarrassment couldn't stop me from staring at her boyfriend-cum-mythical man like… like…

"Edward, cut that out!"

"What?"

"You're _doing that thing_."

"_Hmmm?_" I wavered, reaching blindly for the recliner Old Mother Slaughter Swan used to commandeer like a throne.

Charlie coughed as he entered the living room. _Or maybe it was the 'dead' room._ _Damn, I'd really dropped too much acid back in the day._

I looked over at him and swam to the surface.

"Renee," his brawny arms opened, pulling the snug t-shirt tight around his shoulders and chest.

Finally breaking through whatever freaky film the kid had thrown over me—_I narrowed my eyes at Edward, I was pretty sure he'd hypnotized me—_I made to Charlie.

_Charlie._

You know when you have this old, soft t-shirt you like to wear about the house? That had been my remembrance of Charlie. Now though, he was different, less diffident.

And the difference was good.

Better than I'd remembered.

All those nights, days, weeks, months, years away.

There was nothing soft about him, except maybe his generous heart.

_Oh, lord, I'd missed him. Missed this. The fit of our bodies together._

I'd always left a light on. No matter what hovel, motel, hotel or house I'd stayed in.

For Charlie.

So our flame might never be extinguished.

_Put out with a hiss of wet fingertips to wick._

That had been me.

Sallow, a tallow, leaking candle… waxy, soft and malleable.

I'd been weak.

I'd let Mother Swan get under my skin.

In a situation that assaulted me with its divergence from everything I'd ever known, I'd succumbed.

That self-righteous piece of work had won.

"_What do you mean you don't want any more children?"_ _she'd hollered at me._

_It had been just a slip, a little lullaby to my baby… that she would be my only one… because I had no need of another, not with her and Charlie._

_She'd glared at me as if I was unnatural._

_Maybe I was._

_I felt like I was, here with her and trying to torque into expectations that were ill-fitting… expectations that were mine. Hers. Never Charlie's._

_She was almost upon me, her motherly love transmogrified into a grotesque mirage of ghoulishness._

_I'd merely wanted to be._

_Raising an arm across my face, turning my back and huddling over little Isabella, I'd awaited the blow of flesh that I was sure would take over from the lashing of her voice._

_There was nothing._

_Nothing but hard pants and a gut-deep growls, "Do not raise your hand to my wife or my child ever again, Mother."_

_Charlie._

_I'd carried Bella up to her bedroom, sunk into the rocking chair, opened my blouse and put her to my breast, calming her, calming me._

"_She won't be back," his head was upon my knees._

_I'd rocked._

_Rocked and rocked and cradled Bella's soft downy hair with one hand and Charlie's thick strands with the other._

_I'd already known I was leaving._

_I hated myself for it, for this, for what I'd done to him._

_For not thinking I could be just that right amount of enough._

I knew better now.

She'd preyed on my every vulnerability. Weakened, susceptible, subsumed.

I'd left.

Now, a bit roughly, Charlie took me to the loveseat, his voice that smoky roll, that ridiculously sexy timbre as he scattered his fingertips over my arm and then cautiously sat an inch away from me.

_As if I didn't want him as close to me as possible._

"So, Edward, tell me about your family," _Oh my hell, I was doing it, I was becoming that mom._

His brow furrowed and a part of him tightened up, "Well, Miss Swan, it's complicated."

"Oh, don't tell me that, son… can't be worse than what we got going on right here," I slapped at his arm, then bit back a yowl of pain because what the shit was he made of? Steel?

Then I was horrified because he was apologizing, and I'd pretty much punched _him._

Charlie was austere as he stood, "Let me get you some ice for that, baby."

Only the 'baby' at the end took me somewhat back into myself.

I shook my head, _I apologized._

I looked at them.

And then I got it. Edward's arm was draped around my Bella, she was snuggled into his side. Although his movements were almost imperceptible, his hand never stopped the tender brush over her fingers and up to the skin of her inner elbow.

And she was tucked against him. Just as she'd been to me.

_He loved her. He would protect her now. He would be her future._

Blinking back the hot burn of sudden tears of understanding, I thanked Charlie for the icepack offered with one hand and the Kleenex he gave with the other.

My little girl.

I used to sing _Landslide _and _Gypsy_to her at bedtime.

She was his singer; I'd gotten that much out of Charlie.

Her blood called to him more than anything of this world or the next. _To take her, to murder her._

He'd chosen to mate with her.

The strength, the passion, the insane incongruity and irony of it all…

Quietly, I watched them all interact.

Awed, I saw no struggle within Edward.

Though he was somewhat eerily muted in all his motions, and pale as snow, and perfectly formed; he was simply a boy in love.

"You kids go on and get something to eat, Renee and me are just going to catch up," Charlie, perceptive Charlie, was more aware than I that the two needed some time together.

Or maybe he thought _we_ needed some time alone?

My palms started sweating, I felt like swearing, and I really needed a drink; a tall stiff one… _until…_

_Eat?_

The hair raised along the damp back of my neck. Staring at Charlie, I tried to mouth some sort of warning words at him but found myself grasping at air. _Eat? What had gotten into him? Was he now condoning… _internally I spluttered… _Edward, vampire, our daughter, human… blood, mayhem, death…_

Watching my expression approaching apoplexy, only Edward seemed to understand what the hell I was thinking. He slowly advanced, as if gentling a wild, unpredictable animal, "I don't partake of human blood," he looked dishearteningly into my eyes, his own pupils a shade of autumnal goldenrod. He inspected his hands, turning them over, keenly focused on their long and limber appearance, as if seeing the very dots of crimson splattered upon them.

"Animals." His words were so low, so in tune with my thoughts. "I only take animals, now." _Now._ That didn't really help. I began to fuss anew when the melted appearance of his irises undertowed me once more.

"Edward!"

Immediately the feeling of being wrapped in the softest silky caftan was stolen from me.

Bella held me by my waist, "It's his eyes. They're powerful." She watched him head toward Charlie, who was holding open the front door.

"They're spellbinding, aren't they?" Still doubting my coherency, I nodded. "They used to be green."

_Crimson and Clover._ Stems of flowers… the unstemmed flow of blood.

The opening to his soul; they'd been green. He'd been mortal. He'd had parents and a childhood and friends. _He'd known my family. _ He'd died. He'd become immortal.

And he was just a young man.

Destined to be with my daughter.

My heart _ached _for him, even while I was anxious about Bella.

After we'd seen them off and Charlie'd gone to the kitchen to call-in some food, I tiptoed to the front curtains, _that same ones I'd hand-tailored, lopsidedly._

Taken back through time, I was stopped in my tracks until a flurry of movement outside made me pull the curtains aside enough to peer out. There they were, and it wasn't even as if they were making out; they were making love… with their clothes on. All arms and legs and hands reaching, wandering, grabbing, starving, consuming. Their mouths kissing so tightly, the pain of neediness creating a harsh scribble over their faces.

_Enraptured._

So much more than the simple, sublime state of 'being in love'.

Hoping they didn't see me, I slipped back across the room.

Charlie brought me a beer and a chaser.

I drank the shot straight away. Held the glass out for another with a whiskey-roughened, "Please."

He smirked, his mustache hitching up the side of his mouth, highlighting the carnal berth of his lips.

I bit down on my own.

Eyes widening and then falling heavy.

He quirked his head and excused himself.

I watched the lope of his walk, his very fine ass beneath the creases of his tan slacks.

We made small talk over take-out, ignoring the two fat elephants in the room; my awkwardness with Charlie (because I was having a hard time not leaping into his lap and finding out if he in as good a shape as he seemed to be) and the fact our child was irretrievably in love with an unearthly being.

Only the deadening of alcohol pushed away my worry enough that I was able to ask a few questions about Edward: his family here, how old he really was, and what had happened to him.

Sensing my unusual unease, Charlie gave the answers I searched for with precision.

But even without flowery phrases, I heard my own heart turning cold, cracking, breaking for the boy who would never be again.

"I feel his death," I ascribed, as a new launch of tears took to my cheeks.

Through really loud sobs, I took more gulps of beer, the cold wet mixing with the warm salt.

Backhanding my eyes, I gave Charlie a careworn smile.

"I'm so worried about Bella."

The depth of his emotion finally showed as the corners of his face crunched up, plainly concerned for the future. Pushing aside cartons of MSG-laden carbs, he sat next to me, turned into me until our crossed knees touched, and he lay back against the arm of the couch, bringing me with him, across his body until the sublime, strong blanket that was Charlie, who had been my husband, comforted me out of my crying jag.

His large hand smothered most of my head as I nestled into the crook of his throat, groaning-sniffing his aftershave mingling with the whiff of perspiration.

"Baby, I know." _Baby._

I pulled up on his shoulders so my breasts were right over his chest, right beneath his chin as he lowered that dimpled, swarthy squareness as he talked smoothly to me.

I felt the rasp of a day's growth of stubble scratching along my neck and slightly against the tops of my tits.

My breath shuddered, and I thanked _whoever_ that I could blame it on the fact I was obviously emotionally unsound.

"And we always _knew_."

"Did we?" I pushed down with my forearms neatly placed on his pectorals, not a scant inch of flesh dented beneath me.

"Renee, of course we did," he held my face, and I knew if he would just lift up a couple inches, we'd be kissing. "All along, all her life… _hell, all your life… _there's just something unusual about you two. _My girls._" He stopped, and looked aside, perhaps embarrassed by his saying. I drew my finger down his throat, and he met me back, "My woman."

Just the difference of his voice, from crisp and clear to rugged and rough, made me hang nearer, staring at his mouth.

The littlest shift of his hips propped me closer to his crotch until my pussy was reunited with his dick.

Even while I rolled myself against him, moaning and breathing raggedly, I _knew_ there was still too much to say, too much to atone for.

"_Uh… uh…_" I sighed and watched his lips and felt his cock and _wanted._

But I wouldn't make the same mistakes again.

_Maybe… why not… just a kiss?_

No.

Reproaching myself, I jumped off Charlie and gathered up the containers of food and hurried to the garbage. He swore and rolled his well-built arms up over his face, hiding the grim sensuality of his heaving eyes, his luscious-ready-to-kiss lips.

I sat out back and smoked three cigarettes in quick succession.

Counting all the ways I sucked along with the brilliant, dancing escapades of the Northwest's never ending shooting stars.

Inside, he'd tidied up, and taken off his shirt, in preparation for bed.

_Because the sight of his mouthwatering upper body was really going to help my peace of mind._

I concentrated on fiddling with my smokes, rummaging for something to drink, wondering if I should just stay at a motel.

He offered the bedroom to me.

I scoffed, but hopefully not so loud he noticed.

_No way in hell was I sleeping in that room without him._

He'd made up the spare room.

He walked up the stairs.

He looked back down and I wanted to lunge at him, because I knew the longing in his eyes echoed my own.

I waited until I heard his door closed before I even dared let myself up there with him, on the same floor, in whatever he wore to bed, intimately sleeping.

_~~ll~~_

I don't think I'd even shut my eyes.

I know I'd masturbated… twice. With the pillow over my face, suffocating my exclamations.

The clock with its neon green numbers winked at me jeeringly: 2:12.

Strung out, fucked up to be back here, wondering where the nearest weed was, I got up.

At the very least I needed a pee.

I'd washed my hands and was sneaking back down the narrow hall when the telltale creak of the stairs turned me into a statue.

Step four, wide and to the left.

Step nine, right in the middle.

The same treads I remembered.

Stationed outside Charlie's bedroom, diagonally across from Bella's, I couldn't make my feet unstick from the running board of the rug.

"Shit," he muttered as the topped-up water from his glass spilled in plops to the floor.

He looked around the landing and then took off his sweats, using them as a mop, leaving him in boxers that gaped open at the fly.

Flattening my palms to the itchy wallpaper, I'd stonewalled and measured how long it would take him to reach me.

Clutching his drink and his pants in one hand, he blindly sought the wall.

Bungling, I jumped to the other side.

His sight adjusted, he made me out, "Renee?"

We hopscotched around each other until I was back to our old marital doorway.

He just…_stood there._ Practically naked. All stark hills and leveled planes and criss-crosses of muscles and a thatch of thick hair that ran from the middle of his chest to an attenuated trail that circumscribed his belly button then bloused out a bit down his stomach and beneath the waistband of his shorts.

A _creak_ and _squawk_.

There was only one bed being used, and it sounded like it had more than a single occupant.

Charlie's head shot to the door, I stomped my foot and curled my fists straight down at my sides.

I started towards Bella's bedroom only to be hauled back and into Charlie's—_our —_bedroom.

Closing the door with the most silent snick, Charlie had just enough time to turn towards me before I was at his throat, and all thoughts of dry humping him flew out the window in favor of thumping him.

"You let them-" I held my voice to a wiry, vicious whisper.

In return, he grabbed my wrists and brought them to a halt against his stomach, which really only inflamed me more, "Whoa, baby… what happened to my free-loving flower child?" His whisper was softer, smoother, velvetier… _sexy._

"Not funny, Charlie!" I struggled, but he held me tight until my fingers flattened to the dents of his muscles where they gained proprietary purchase and gathered momentum, searching out the spots that had always made him hiss and flinch and jerk. Grumbling quietly, I watched my hands roam his lower half, "_Deflower power…"_

He laughed huskily but stopped just as the rise in his shorts made his arousal obvious.

Up to his face, my eyes hungrily feasted, I swayed closer, "Aren't you supposed to fill him with lead or something?"

A slight twist of his waist and his shorts slipped until his head butted up against the waistband, and I could see it trying to ease out, "Well he is rather impervious," shaking his dark head, which made the ductile fabric shudder over his cock, "and he's already dead."

Headiness was making me dizzy, I closed my eyes against the heat cottoning us together.

"I already talked to the boy," Charlie brought my hands up to his chest, crying out in surprise when I scraped across his nipples, the same reaction he'd always had… the tan, satin skin hardening.

"_Mullo,_" I muttered, enthralled with his body's reaction to me.

"And his father."

He let go my wrists and tipped the backs of his fingers over my tits. Closing my eyes, I bit my inner cheek, "_Sire._"

"His buckshot's misfiring."

I gurgled on a laugh that turned into a long moan when the heel of his palm touched against the mound of my pussy, "_Uh… _you and your analogies."

"What?" he raised an eyebrow at me, and his mustache hitched, my clitoris swelled.

The air thickened like the Forks' fog.

We were in our bedroom.

The covers were turned down, but the bed not slept in.

"Baby, you getting all conservative on me?" The burn of Charlie's lips dragged a line from the corner of my mouth to my temple, leaving just his goddamn cleft chin for me to suck.

Stepping back, I framed his face, "Charlie, I-"

_I was stupid, I was wrong, I still love you, I'm tired of running, I want you back…_

I want to come home.

I was choking.

Gruff, silencing, a fingertip to my mouth and one raised to my breast again, calling my nipple up to a tight peak, Charlie's hot words incinerated me, "Don't you remember young love, _baby_?"

I remembered _this_.

My hand was on its own course, up his thigh and into the lax leg of his boxers, flesh-to-flesh contact. Silky, hot balls formed and rolled, and I held around them both, pushed my palm up until they overflowed the cup I made, and wreathed the very base of his gorgeous cock in my fingers.

As soon as he pounded back against the door, I withdrew my hand as if scorched.

"_Arrrg, fuck Renee!"_

"I'm sorry, I-" unwittingly, I pulled my hand down over my shamed face, smelling the musk of him there, my shoulders tucked in, "I can't do this."

He never stopped looking at me as he opened the door; I felt his stare. His hand layered at the bottom of my spine, his thumb rubbed, I half-caught his expression… that same one. Half-smile. Half-frown.

Half hopeful, half hurt.

Neither of us moved. Me outside, him inside.

I leaned over, and shut the door.

"_I can't do this… yet."_

He was still there, I knew it; I heard his quiet curse, "_Goddammit!" _

_~~ll~~_

"What?"

"Nothin'."

"So stop looking at me like that!"

"Okay."

"You're still staring."

"Soooorry!"

"What? Should I have worn something else? Do I look alright?"

"You look fine."

"Fine? I look _fine?_"

"You're gorgeous, you know that." He stooped, "_You know what you do to me."_

"Then why are _they_ staring at me?"

Charlie toed the gravel outside the Cullens' house. House. More like a pristine, pretty, circa 1900s Victorian pile set like a gabled, fabled centerpiece in the middle of a long meadow.

It was unbelievable.

They could have some wicked celebrations out here, in the dead of night—_I laughed at my own pun_—seeing as they never slept and all.

He thumbed toward Edward and Bella, waiting for us on the wrap-around porch, "Ummm, Edward can read minds… _and-he-has-impeccable-hearing,_" Charlie pronounced as hastily as possible.

Oh. _Oh. OH NO!_

Mortified, I pivoted away, "You could have told me this when I had your dick in my hand last night!" I yelled, then remembered and latently lowered my voice, "You knew?"

Bella was looking at us with a frown on her forehead and a smirk on her lips. Edward was holding her from behind, stifling quiet chuckles in my daughter's hair.

He looked up with his molten eyes, just like a chagrined teenager, to call over "Sorry, Miss Swan," _oh, that name… Bella's, I should have gotten rid of it, but I couldn't…_ "Technically though, I can hear _most people_," he bent to sneak a kiss into Bella's neck, "But not Isabella."

Bella drew her hands over his arms and shut her eyes with a smile to hear her name fall from his lips.

I mouthed to Charlie, "He calls her Isabella? And he doesn't get nut-punched?"

Charlie grinned and nodded.

Mollified enough to step up to the house, I relaxed a small bit, pulling my hair off my neck, feeling Charlie behind me and his breath against me _right there._

"Seems hereditary, actually," Edward opened the door and guided us through. "She must have gotten her 'shield' from Chief Swan as I cannot make out his thoughts either."

Charlie puffed out his chest and appeared proud.

I rolled my eyes.

"But from you, Isabella was granted her beauty, and her spirit, Miss Swan," Edward smiled and I felt myself swimming again.

_Smooth talker, this one._

I think Charlie growled. Edward's smile lifted to a grin. I begged, "Please, call me Renee."

He bowed slightly, propping the door open, "Renee it is."

I took up with Charlie quickly before the lions, or vampires, or _what-have-you,_ descended, "Is this one of their things, reading minds? Can they all do it?"

"No, apparently he had this gift as a human boy, from his mother they say. Eliza Anatolia Masen."

_Of course, the Romany Anatolias would be thus gifted!_

I had to remember they were all unliving as they descended from various parts of the house.

Their remarkable artistry aside, their quirky stop-gaps of movement gave off the barest tell that they were nervous as me.

The man of the family, Carlisle, took my hand and gallantly, lightly, cherished it, "Miss Swan, so very nice to meet you."

All caramel and cream and handsome, he wore a mantle of sure, intact strength of mind and body that was awesome to behold. A Renaissance marble sculpture on earth.

_Charlie groused in the background._

Carlisle huffed a laugh and welcomed him too, "Charlie, good to see you again."

"My wife," Carlisle scooped her around, "Esme."

"Oh my!" I blurted, then blushed. She hummed with vibrancy that sank about her, as if she'd ingested half a dozen mushrooms… completely at ease and totally aware, her eyes languidly darting around with pleasure at the gathering of all our kin.

"Renee," she charmed me with just that utterance and the wholesome candor of her emotion—_they were unable to cry, but it felt as though her eyes were brimming like a pot of gold splashing over._

Charlie spoke up this time, "Esme, thank you for inviting us to your home."

I gawped at him and became just slightly, fractiously, jealous.

For she was a goddess made real. Curvy and perfect and lovely and fully immortalized.

And homey, I understood as one-by-one I met the rest of their brood. Emmett, Rosalie, Alice, and Jasper.

Each more visually stupefying than the next, each linked to the other, each brimming with nothing of the horror I expected… just love, and many a hurtful history.

In getting to know them, _over cocktails_, I understood… through flashes and glimpse of each couple's coming together, how completely devastating it must have been for Edward… almost a century. Alone. Waiting. Observing. The first son, while those around him paired up in love.

He snagged my musings and looked straight at me and hugged Bella closer in that manly protective way until she distractedly slapped at his hand winding around her waist, causing him to beam with pride and… _oh my. He felt, finally, like he belonged, like he was accepted, because of Bella._

He nodded.

I took a tissue from my gargantuan bag and tried to be quiet while I wiped my eyes.

_To belong. To feel right._

To forgive the past.

_Make right._

Edward wasn't looking at me, but at Charlie, who was telling some tall tale or other, but I knew he was listening… and I didn't mind. A minor lopsided smile aimed at me, and a curious look at the sparkling dame who was Alice made me wonder.

I knocked against Charlie, "Alice?"

"Knows the future."

I sat back and inhaled deeply, centering myself.

_They knew._

I didn't feel trespassed.

I felt… _blessed._

And I knew right then, I'd give my blessing.

The evening's sunset washed out to a new, clean darkness.

Night fell.

I learned that Esme was also of German descent. That her upbringing had been impossibly reviling. That she'd given up on living when her baby had died—the one hope for a bairn to take away all the pain that had been putrifyingly pounded, slammed, kicked into her.

I knew her favorite book was _The Pied Piper_ because that was what Carlisle was to her.

I fathomed that she'd had to seduce him… eventually.

I got that Edward and Esme were not just son and mother, but also very close friends.

That they'd been the only people… _the only ones_… who could possibly understand the hell they'd each been through.

I smiled to myself, wishing Esme and I had met decades ago, because I would have like to have seen her in the seventies; I bet she'd have been a trip worth taking.

I watched her large brood, saw the way she happily clucked over them, making sure to touch everyone with her words and her hands. _She'd been made for this_.

"You were, too," the words hardly registered, sent as they were on nothing but the slightest breeze of Edward's voice.

_I had been._

I was.

I was ready.

They wanted to know about the Black Dutch and the Masens, about my heritage and the Anatolians to the Higgins.

To Esme, I explained, "I guess I just never lost that wanderlust," _until now._

"It was so long ago, and the stories unravel with each telling… Edward, do you remember anything of…" I asked.

"No ma'am," _Oh, the manners, I could give him a peck on his pretty cheeks!_

Charlie, I swear, he snarled this time and glared at me.

_Damn, did everyone have ESP now?_

I narrowed my eyes at him, and then rolled them for good measure.

"Our two families were twined even before their ante litteram to the welcoming arms of Lady Liberty."

Without caution, they sat closer.

"It's really very simple. Edward's part was foretold centuries ago. _Youth Without Age, Life Without Death._ A young man would live eternally, by the Anatolians' words… they just never knew who this ageless being would be," I gently tapped Edward's shoulder.

"Of course, it was more than fairy tales. It took very little for gypsy bands living side-by-side in brotherly love to turn into warring factions," I laughed briefly, "I can just imagine the feathers flying when you befriended my _urgrossmutter_,Lieselotte."

"Turf warfare and fairground brawls only aided the feud between the Higgins and the Anatolias, because their two stories," I reached for Charlie but had no need as he was immediately surrounding me, "fabled endings that were ultimately at odds."

Our stories.

Our histories.

Patchworked together_._

"_Amongst the Germans there were beautiful fairy princesses who stood apart from the hourglass of time, housed in their glass palace like it was an unbreakable coffin in which they breathed and lived but never aged, and the moat swimming around it tasted of the Fountain of Youth, there was told a folk story of a Teutonic family of fair maidens. The Higgin clan. It was said their touch disarmed the passage of time, and ceased its clip-clopping motion."_

The jarring sound of voices rent the silence asunder until I made clear, "There's more, the other side… the Romanys and their foretelling of _youth without age and life without death_:

"_Taking the cure, the emperor and empress returned cheerfully to the palace, and after several days the empress felt herself full with child. The whole country, and the whole court, and all the servants rejoiced at this event _

"_Right before the hour of birth, the child put up such a storm of weeping that no wizard was able to console him. Then the emperor began to pledge the child all the good things in the world, but neither was he able to quiet him, though he did everything in his power. _

"_Be quiet, Daddy's dear one, the emperor said, and I'll give you this or that kingdom; be quiet son, and I'll give you this or that emperor's daughter to wive, and a lot of other things like that." Finally, when the emperor saw over and over again that the child wouldn't be still, he said on top of that, "Be quiet my son and I'll give you youth without age and life without death."_

"_Then the child quieted down and got born._

"But more:

"_She spared their lives out of pure pleasure, for she had never before seen a human being. Restraining the savage beasts, she soothed them, and sent them back to their haunts. She was a tall, slender, lovely fairy, quite too beautiful. When the young hero saw her, he stood still as though turned to stone." _

"We Higgins _end_ endless life," my voice spun out… my lips turned over, my face neared Charlie's shoulder.

I muffled against him, "I'm sorry."

He held me, guarded me, hugged me.

Edward spoke up, "Yes, but no one knows how that endless life ends." He appeared relaxed; I was awed.

Carlisle assented, "What's to be, will be." Then he silently tolled Edward, "I agree, the fortune isn't finished… _your love isn't finite._"

"Mind if I go outside and-?" I shook my box of cigarettes at Esme.

"Not at all, there's an ashtray under the swing," she held up hand, "just as long as you're not too close, because we are rather combustible."

_Another good thing to know._

I took a deep drag and let out the billowy smoke,

Charlie sat beside me, "You okay?"

"Getting there."

He took up that place outside and inside me, clasping me to him, "Better?"

My knees rested over his lap and my face to his shoulder, "_Yes."_

I walked back in ahead of him, watching them all shaking off the drear of the last story. Emmett was stood in the center of the room, holding court, making them all snort with whatever jest he was telling.

I sank back to Charlie, and he buttressed me.

My plumes that had molted off were replenished… _maybe I could still fly._

_Maybe we could save our daughter and her lover._

In that age-old way he had, Charlie twirled me away and brought me to him again.

There was no song but for our hearts beating: mine, his, Bella's.

"What?"

I needed to find my way home, to him.

Unhindered, I enveloped him, and asked again, "What?"

"She's our daughter."

His fingers, calloused, reached upwards to the sway of my tits but stopped short because we were in precognitive, mind-reading, vampire presence.

_I held my breath._

"She's met her mate, her match," Charlie's mustache touched my ear then lowered to my neck, and I moaned and raised my arms back, creating a halo above his head of all our tarnished past.

"We'll see you at home, later," he tried but failed to be a strict father.

We gave our goodbyes.

There was a definite lightness in my carriage.

Placing me in the cruiser, Charlie started the car and sat.

I was no longer fidgety. Earnestly, I made my way over the console to his lap.

"I should have stopped my mother long before you-" his face collapsed.

"I don't need that, Charlie," I painted over his forehead and into his hair, "It was me and my youth, and it never would have worked then."

Crestfallen, he attempted to lift me off, place me aside, put the car in drive, get out of here, get away from me.

He'd shown me _everything._

I owed him—_us_—this.

Homecoming.

"You defended me, you loved me, you honored me," I yanked his hands aside and sat them over my hips, "You gave us Isabella."

He was breathing deeply, still not meeting my eyes.

"Charlie Swan, I love you."

He slowly rose up, hands and face.

"_Charlie Swan,"_ I kissed his lips lightly, "_I love you."_

"Baby, say it again," He strolled all over me until the windows fogged up, and I forgot all those Cullens could hear us.

"_I love you."_

"_I love you."_

"_I love you."_

Born.

New.

Again.

Of old.

Because we Swans, we mate for life…

"… _and the Queen went to the King, who was greatly moved, and she began to speak and said, "Dearest husband, now I may speak and declare to thee that I am innocent, and falsely accused." And she told him of the treachery of the old woman who had taken away her three children and hidden them. Then to the great joy of the King they were brought thither, and as a punishment, the wicked step-mother was bound to the stake, and burnt to ashes. But the King and the Queen with their six brothers lived many years in happiness and peace." ~_ _The Six Swans_

_

* * *

_

~Well…so….Renee (I really hope you liked her!), and Charlie (DILF DILF!)…what did you think? Oh, and that old battleaxe Marie Swan…~

References:

_The Six Swans_, Grimm's Fairy Tales:  
grimm(DOT)pangyre(DOT)org/tale/49-the-six-swans(DOT)html

_Youth Without Age and Life Without Death_, Petre Ispirescu:

www(DOT)childrenstories(DOT)ca/Stories/Youth-Without-Age-And-Life-Witho(DOT)html

The Higgin Family fairy tale is original to goldenmeadow.

**GOLDEN LEMON AWARDS! **

Eddie/_Dead Confederates_ has been nominated for two Golden Lemons!

Best Dirty Talk & Best Creative Position. Voting ends August 30th.

www(DOT)kwiksurveys(DOT)?surveyID=KCOMLN_bd9343f3&UID=1602093106

Cheers,

Rie~


	10. Dive

Very many thanks to my extremely generous and patient betas, Viola Cornuta and Vanessarae.

Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight.

Dialogue in the first section is italicized because it's from a previous chapter, _Flight._

Italicized quotes, unless otherwise notated, are from _Youth Without Age and Life Without Death._

Much love and my most heartfelt thanks to Viola for her grand research and for finding the deeply slumberous quote at the beginning, and to winterstale for her Tennessee expertise. These ladies are my rocks, and they rock my socks off ;).

**Editing note: The chapter numbering went off track back at Sky, apologies. Sky should have been noted as chapter six, Flight as chapter seven, and Nest as chapter eight. **

~~Very much love for all the kind comments about Renee! I'm pretty excited to put this one out, so I hope you enjoy it~~

Song: _18__th__ Floor Balcony, _Blue October

www(DOT)youtube(DOT)com/watch?v=C7SMEfyAWfo

Thank you, Derrydown Green

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Nine: Dive**

**Edward Cullen**

_Do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot beat quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death that we owe the better tributary, half our life to him: and there is a good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men's oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia? Can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it._

~ Thomas Dekker(c. 1572 –1632)

Sleep eluded me, had left me deluded for nearly one hundred years. Never more so than after we'd made love, after she'd come to my room and seen all the reams and reels of her I'd created out of non-memories…_was she real, was this all some perfect nightmare? Had I really died of Spanish Influenza back in 1918 with this nothing more than a ghost's existence? Had I created her out of a fevered, agued imagination?_

She felt tangible.

But what did I know of _touch?_

She was… _breakable._

Like a nebulous apparition of magmic blood whose rivery flowery flow flooded her body—so completely nude and flushed like sunrise and gnashed by the thousands of hard caresses I'd tried to soften to her tissue.

Millions of strokes and sucks and laps and downy-mighty thrusts… and each one just a grain of sand on a dune that would never fill the cut-open hole of me.

It was so glaringly obvious, I had no recourse but to keep her at arm's length.

_If she was truly here, I would forever be insatiable for her taste, inside and out, and her love. _Her heart—as the blood-driving, fist-sized, veinous organ caged under her breastbone, and as the figurative, femored shape of unquantifiable _feeling._

_Love._

For a week, she'd teased me, tried to bend my will, which was fairly non-negotiable after a century of ascetic living-dying-suiciding.

Kisses and cocksuckling and stolen rubs, and every time I'd pulled her away from me.

_Insomniacal cycles._

I was so insanely insane with the ludicrous desire for her body slicking so tightly over my penis again, I couldn't even see straight. The perfect acuity of my vision blurred with the haze of erogeny.

I'd insulted her with my distance. _But she remained._

_Real?_

"_I'm not alive, Isabella."_

_Tell me you're extant._

"_You are alive. I exist. I am here."_

Real.

"_I want to taste your blood, all the time."_

Injury.

Always untouchable before, that time she'd looked as if I'd slapped her.

Her proximity so deafeningly quiet I'd wanted to roar, _destroy_, do anything to change her reaction.

_Inured._

I'd hardened myself to the possibility that she really lived, that she could truly love me, that she understood I was a vampire; that she'd remain.

_I felt certain she'd leave._

And she would. When she died.

She'd struggled silently. I'd stood stoically. My erection still fierce and bright and ready to pound.

My lips lined, my eyes had closed over her wilted features.

It could have been minutes, mere seconds… _it could have been centuries for all I knew anymore._

My eyelids had gasped open, and I'd reeled like a drunkard with the feather, pillow-soft weight of her pronounced nakedness blooming and unfurling over me like sunshine incubating me from within, _without._

I'd scooted back and she'd followed, undeterred, determined anew.

_Don't let me walk away._

"_You'd have ended my life already, Edward, if you were going to."_

I'd blinked, blinded by the ethereal glow of her settling against my chest, and pelvis, thighs and penis.

"_Yes,"_ I curled my arms around her like her ribs tucked around that suction-beat-pulse heart of hers, brought one of her legs between mine and lowered my balls to her tremblingly strong thigh, sighing, _"I love you more than that, Isabella."_

_Help me not kill you, not love you too much._

She'd shaken her head and kissed my Adam's apple and grazed my neck with her fingers, and we'd looped together in a languid, sloppy dance with my cock instantly inside of her swaying silkiness and slough-shift-grip.

_~~ll~~_

_"Welcome, my handsome prince. What do you seek here?"_

_"We seek Youth without Age and Life without Death."_

_Then he dismounted from his horse and entered the palace, where he found two other ladies, both of the same age, the elder sisters of the first one. He began to thank the fairy for having delivered him from danger, but she and her sisters, to show their joy, had a handsome banquet served in golden dishes. They gave the horse liberty to graze wherever it chose, and afterward made it acquainted with all the wild beasts, so that it might rove about the forest in peace. The ladies entreated the prince to stay with them, saying that it was so tiresome to be alone. He did not wait to be asked a second time, but accepted the offer with the satisfaction of a man who has found precisely what he sought.  
_

_Sated._

We decided to 'date'.

I had no idea what that meant.

I'd never 'dated'.

I came to be decent enough at it, this dating thing.

And it included 'fucking'. And fucking, now that I'd discovered the wet, messy, sexy, unrestrained—_nearly—_impounding, expounding, _pounding_ white-light stream-steam-tight touch-pull-thrill of _fucking_, was… inexplicably paramount, suddenly.

I swaggered around with a… _smile._ One that became a near-sneer as soon as I was in Bella's presence, until I could have her, wherever I could have her. Kitchen tables and counters. Cold, glazed windows with her gorgeously lush and squeezable bottom on the sill, sliding this way and that across the glass so that her skin squeaked in time with her moans and the lightest-darkest whimper-groans fed from her lips both pursed and opened up in pink pouts. Her knees on my hips, and my dick funneling into her, stopping to roll and thrust shortly before beginning the long, languid march out her beautiful buttercream-petal _pussy _again.

Hours were too short; they could have been seconds. All those minutes I spent between her thighs. I'd ask her to sit at my desk, upon my chair, naked, so the scent of her sex impregnated the seat, and I'd smell her there for days afterward.

She studied and I studied her, memorizing the arch of her back and the dimples above her ass framed by the chair's ladders. The shadow-and-light bars across her body, uniforming her dark and bright. The tip of her nipples, juicy cherry pips tilting up from the handhold slope of her breasts. The minute count of her ribs down her sides and the curved shells of her shoulders. Her breaths humming in and out as she twirled a curl of her loosed hair about her index finger and pressed the pungent pink eraser of her pencil to the bow of her mouth. The crease of her forehead in concentration. All of her blinks. Her hairline with tufts of chestnut filaments, her hair in tendrils wild down her spine. Her spine in its arcane beauty. Her heels, roughened and weathered from walking barefoot over grass and rubble, perched on rungs. Her legs, crossing—ankles, then over one knee, ladylike, delicate, long-longing lingering visions of them held by her ankles up to my shoulders and then opened in a wide 'V' as I bit my lip with cuts and dashed my dick _feverishly_ in and out of her as fast as I dared. Durable stiffness so thick and untamed I cried out with each entry, each exit, her lips sucking and sucking and… _fucking, fucking._

"I can feel you watching me." She smiled and bent her head in my direction but didn't look at me.

"_Mmmm,"_ I murmured but said nothing more.

I'd take her out to eat, and bring her back… to _eat out._

Right there in that chair. I was becoming completely, unabashedly, seventeen-years-old in my urgent need to have her.

Her ankle under her thigh, opening the hidden, swollen realm of her body that glistened and punctuated the air like balloon-thoughts until I was on my knees in front of _Isabella._ Her legs switched beneath my anchoring hands wrapped like irons and reaching higher. Fingers wetted to my mouth, fingers folding and flicking up and down her labia…flitting inside to her cresting lazarus red, resting my forehead to her hipbone and moaning, intoning, ingesting, egressing.

Every single swirl of my fingertips raised her hips. Every guided hush of my breath brought her back down.

_I would spend the rest of my timeless life, right here._

Slipping two fingers into her, _quickly, _I sliced the pads of my fingertips open, added another.

Sluice… slippery... skating my hand lower, I held her ass up and rubbed the rosebud pucker of her bottom, _slowly_.

Bella braided above me, her hands in my hair. Attempting to pull me away and pull me closer.

_At odds. Always._

I snuck my pinky inside, and she gripped me and hissed. I hissed and kissed and splayed her pussy open so I could see all the deep red-glimmer-cum mirroring. Mining. _Mine._

Lazily, I wiped her with my tongue trolling like a tugboat across her clitoris. I held her hood back and lipped up and down and over and around the squandered tip of deliciousness.

I licked her lips, up and down and angled sideways and made out with all her creases, yanking mewls from her throat.

I plunged inside with my tongue between two fingers so every single nerve and verve and ending and beginning turned scalding and shorn and short. Our breaths were curt and her cunt tightened and I turned my little finger, just so little of it in her ass, and I lapped her clit up and down and bit her lips and tongue-finger-fucked Isabella until I was standing over her, _so into this._ I was bending her, my hands inside of her, my mouth upon her, my head shoved against her and her heels on the seat of the chair. I looked up and her face was harrowed and glowing and crossing borders and borderline gone.

I crossed her feet and felt her wetness all up my arm; I spread it against me, getting ready.

She backed up and braced and shook her head and nodded her head, and she was still on top of an orgasm as I kicked the chair against the wall and _met her opening with my dick._

We both shouted.

She grabbed my ass with her feet and tarried me forward.

I groaned.

I watched my cock pulse into Bella.

She moaned.

My palms dented and blasted the walls, her howls thickened around us. I tried so hard not to cum so fast, but she grabbed my balls and tugged them down, and I leaped up on my toe-tips and jetted inside of her with a ceaseless climax that came back on me, and down my dick, riveted to her with both our bodies belting away, joined together.

_I swaggered._

My family made fun of me.

And I didn't give a… _fuck._

_~~ll~~_

_By degrees they became accustomed to live together; the prince told them his story and related what he had suffered before meeting them, and after some time he married the youngest sister. At their wedding permission was granted to him to go wherever he liked in the neighborhood; they only begged him not to enter one valley, which they pointed out, otherwise some misfortune would befall him; it was called, they said, the Valley of Lamentation.  
_

The only pain I felt, replacing the antiquated ache of yore, was from our separation… we were minors**, **and just like every other teen we were compelled to pursue interests without each other.

It was a quandary. Bella needed her life as a young woman. _I needed her. _

Her time would be too short, even if she lived to be one hundred years old.

I'd never wanted my humanity back more than I did then.

And the irony of it all made me curdle up in want of crying.

If I'd remained a man and died at my appointed time, I'd have never met Isabella.

Bella was more supernatural than me. And that was saying something. The woven weft between us had begun with my friendship with her great-grandmother, my childhood friend, _Lotte._

A tapestry felted her and I together… _and I shirked off that limitless, insurmountable detonation of travesty I heard building inside of me, block-by-mortal-manmade-block._

Romany gypsies and Black Dutch soothsayers.

Knitted together.

But unraveling each other stitch by stitch.

_In time that could only be cheated so much. _

Something I didn't want to address.

Charlie was kind enough not to bring it up. Oddly, he welcomed me into his home as nothing more than the boy who was courting his daughter.

Willfully disregarding my unnaturalness and agedness, he clapped me on the back, flinching slightly, "Son,"—I laughed under the curl of my lips at his appointment—and he raised a mocking eyebrow at my outburst, leading me to the back porch for what I surmised was a 'father-to-prospective-boyfriend' moment.

"Edward," his voice took on shades of paterfamilias, and I squirmed silently. Twitches that had been faked before became real. My knee jiggled and I drummed my fingers, even sighed when his pause came too long, wondering where Bella was.

He sat opposite me and cracked a beer and licked the foam that headed out of the bottle's neck, squinting at me, his mind infuriatingly mute just like his daughter's. "I don't hold with underage drinking," he began, much to my puzzlement.

_Certainly he knew I was a vampire?_

"Well, I don't drink, Sir… _not manufactured liquids anyway."_ I assured him in such a way that had me frowning and hunching forward with my head lowered.

"Oh well, that's good then, I think," he stated then tagged on, "Or not…" he stumbled and took a long, healthy drink.

_Yes, exactly._

Attempting to ease him, I added, "Sir, I'm taking every precaution to ensure I never harm Isabella."

He raised the opposite eyebrow in a manner that punctiliously questioned, _"Such as?"_

I swallowed the dry razor-like breaths in my throat, several more times than were necessary, "I've had my _ejaculate_ tested by Carlisle. I'm unable to reproduce." An uncomfortable stillness separated us as his eyes dulled, and his mouth pursed in slow motion to the neck of his bottle so he could down the dregs in one go.

_Watching him drink did make me thirsty. If only something as simple as alcohol could quiet the bloodlust-thrill that still tsunamied inside of me, slamming waves of want into my stomach and upwards to ripple throughout my chest and down my arms to my fingers._

I hurriedly carried on, "You can call Carlisle, if you'd like to corroborate this information."

Charlie blinked and blushed, and he smelled similar to Bella in that moment.

I gripped the chair and willed myself not to break it, or my voice-normally a low soothing or salacious register-not to crack like a prepubescent kid's.

"I'll probably do that, Son," he sat over the facts, gnawing his mustache. Currently, I could tell, deciding whether to try to kill me for taking his daughter's virtue, or if he should at least be eased by the fact we couldn't make a half-human, half-dead lovechild.

I'd never experienced such ignominy.

I'd never felt such a rush to meet the approval an 'elder', not since Carlisle, not since Esme.

"What about her heart," he rustled in the cooler by his side and another bottle hissed open with the press of his thumb and forefinger.

"Bella has entrusted me with it, Sir." Earnestly I met his eyes, so brown and deep and fathomless like Bella's. "She honors me with her love. _I've waited three lifetimes and unimaginable incarnations to meet her._ I won't break it, I won't break her heart.

"_She means… all the dark turned to light. All the nights made noontime. All the silent songs set to music. All the world's poems recited. All the death acceptable. All the time lost, found again."_

"Edward." Her voice sure and steady.

_Isabella._

Her eyes were shimmery sheened with an unspilled pond of tears, proof that she'd heard me.

"Dad." She nodded to him in dismissal.

"Bella," he stood and hugged her one handed, his brew in the other.

"Edward," he held out his hand and firmly gripped mine, not surprised by my forthright shake, nodding to me and taking final stock as I squared my shoulders and straightened to my feet and replied, "Sir."

"_Edward," _she breathed as soon as her father was safely housed again. "Edward."

"Edward, Edward," she shook her head and laughed headily and bobbed to herself and stepped towards me unquestionably , and I looked at her fully and knew the total fashioning of that Bella-made smile curving my lips in a shape that was becoming more and more permanent.

"Isabella," my look hooked low to a depth of ocher I knew to be reflecting against her own eyes, and her lips, her breasts, her hips.

"You're here. You're real?" she formed the question with damp poppy lips. I smirked and clasped her hands and pulled them to my chest where a phantom thundering of heart _thud-thumped_ inside my soul.

"_We're here together, and our love is real,"_ stopping-starting breaths swam between us as she rose to her tip toes, and I bent at my knees and our mouths strove to meet, to touch across the air that cinched us tighter. Brushing together to burst out in pitted gasps, but stopping and stilling and innocently nudging.

She giggled against me and smacked her lips lazily over my face.

"Well," I dangled my hands to Bella's bottom, "that was easy enough."

"You haven't met my mom yet," she playfully threatened. "She'll be here on Tuesday."

_Fuck._

Renee was… something else altogether. After meeting Chief Swan, I became… _lazy-in-love._

Sloppy even, around humans.

She hurricaned into the Swan household, and it didn't go well at all.

Looking every bit like her daughter in facial features—apart from her 'taking-me-apart-eyes'—swirling on a cloud of protective mother-love, she wasn't immune to my hypnosis, which was simply an instant, primal instinct I was unable to control when faced with an adversary, but she _was_ impervious to my charisma. Even when I made a distinct effort to win her over.

I suppose I couldn't blame her. Ms. Swan**.** She first came upon me with my mouth latched to her daughter's breast as we made out hungrily on the sofa.

She referred to me, caustically, quietly and to herself, as a _Mullo._ A gypsy vampire.

That I was.

Enfolding Bella in her warmth, she held me at distance.

Deservedly.

I couldn't quell the fear I felt from her disregard of me.

Wishing fervently that I couldn't make out her thoughts, she turned me around in her head, dissected me and my relationship with Bella.

_Distrust._

_Auspicious suspicions._

I didn't want to cause a schism between her and Bella.

_She knew of my kind, she was the source of Bella's inherited sight._

Bella was too incautious for her own good with regards to me. Renee thought it, and I agreed.

I knew it to be true.

_Nothing good will come of this._

It will, _it has to_: a falsity. Based on the fables surrounding us.

Charlie came home.

Charlie surveyed and gently-severely admonished his ex-wife. A man accustomed to the feminine nature, used to her tics and blinders and blindspots and her unusually narrowed vision.

Studiously soothing Renee, Charlie apologized with his motions. He asked for forgiveness from Bella, from me… _he loved his women with a staggering completion._

I dizzied and sat and forgot and pulled Bella into me and watched the come-hither-heather dance between this man and his estranged wife.

_She'd pulled the wool over her own eyes._

Inside the crook of my arms and against my chest and under my chin, Bella resided, breathing, being. I tucked her hair and chucked her chin and kissed her temple and stroked her hip and her fingers and the underside of her elbow.

Renee watched.

Her wrath subsided.

"_He loves her. He will protect her now. He will be her future."_

Her powerful ideas sliced through my sternum in such a flood I needed to get out of there, I was desperate to be with Bella alone.

Released, we made it as far as the sidewalk with its straggling weeds and run over grass and rubble before I threw myself at her. Voraciously fondling her and running my hands and lips all over her. Both throttling her and thrusting her up and letting her fledge and find me. Harshness met arousal met need.

Every part of me hard, I grasped and cooled and heated and harnessed and pulled Bella all over me, stuffing and suffocating myself with her body, her being.

I tripped over my breaths and felt up her tits and put my palm to her pussy and cried out when she ran her thigh up over my hip and held to the roof of my car behind me.

_Blinded._

Her fingers followed my every move, worryingly pursuing my chest and then my back, my stomach to my cock, and I wanted nothing more than to lay her out, like any boy on earth, on my hood and adorn her slit with my dick. _There, right there in the street._

Halting, I snatched air and gave it back to Bella until our intake took in-took out and slowed.

_God._

_Goddamn you._

"What is this?" she shuddered until her nipples brazenly catapulted me into another daze.

"This is love," _love I cannot control._

_~~ll~~_

_The prince spent a very long time at the palace without being aware of it, for he always remained just as young as he was when he arrived. He wandered about the woods without ever having a headache. He amused himself in the golden palace, lived in peace and quiet with his wife and her sisters, enjoyed the beauty of the flowers, and the sweet, pure air. He often went hunting; but one day, while pursuing a hare, he shot two arrows at it without hitting the animal. Angrily chasing it he discharged a third arrow, which struck it, but in his haste the luckless man had not noticed that he had passed through the Valley of Lamentation while following the game._

With Bella, my Isabella, I felt rested, and… _tired?_

I was thoroughly happy—the word and emotion so alien I tried it out on my tongue and found that saying it made me… smile.

Thick brushstrokes of her body filled my canvas, the oily aroma of linseed shrouded her smell.

_Almost._

Cloudy, blue veins.

High, snug, sateen nipples in both blush-pink aureoles and rich crimson dots.

Her legs open.

_Renee had opened to Charlie._

_While I'd made love to Bella, they'd come together and fallen away._

_Their spat the following morning had me chuckling into Bella's throat. _

"_What?" she'd half-turned as her parents stood-off in Carlisle's drive._

"_Lovers' quarrel."_

"_Lovers?" She looked once and twice and thrice and turned fully, "Lovers?"_

"_Yes, almost," I laughed at Renee's raw passion and then her horror at understanding I was able to hear her thoughts talking._

Bella's legs parted.

A nestle of curls atop her labia, the place I loved to fuck with my tongue softly until she coiled up into my face, and I tugged on her triangle of pubic hair with two fingers and licked her clit until it chromatically changed and excitedly flickered.

_The past, the present, our future. What had been endless eons would be limited._

_My part foretold._

_Ageless life._

_Brought to an end._

_By one of them._

_The Higgins._

_Lieselotte, Renee, Bella._

_Anatolias._

_Eliza._

_Me._

_Clans at war._

The indent of her waist above the switch-witchiness of her hips. Never was a bend so sensual.

A two-inch brush up her sides, denoting the concavities, the complexities, the folds.

Bella fingered through her hair and scratched at a bug bite on her ankle and sighed and watched me through every motion of my hand wielding horsehair to stretched canvas.

Gesso gestalted beneath the glaring white I covered in color.

_Living._

_Higgins end endless life._

_But our love is infinite._

A looping circle encapsulated Bella. I had her now, and that wasn't enough. I needed remembrance, nightly visitations, her recollection… the woman who had come to me in my gabled bedroom in Chicago in 1918 in taffeta dress, and silence and decree, deciding our fate through my long sleepless nights.

I told her of my dreams as I ran over the whitewash with every subdued and saturated color of her.

How she'd curiously looked at my belongings. How she'd encouraged my masturbation. How she'd let me make love to her, releasing her from her trim-trapped clothing.

Her eyes lowered.

The glow on her flesh heightened.

"You made love to me, Isabella. In my bedroom, when I was seventeen years old and alive. You came to me, came upon me, let me undress you and took my cock and allowed me to enter you, just here," I tapped her lightly between her thighs with the back of my hand.

I recited our story. How I saw her at the final moment of my life as I died and rebirthed under Carlisle's tutelage.

How I'd lost her face.

How I'd looked for her everywhere.

How I'd lost my mind.

How I'd thought about killing myself.

_What's to be will be._

Tears dropped. Turpentine wash-watery.

_At the Cullen household-my home-two weeks before, Renee had excused herself from the evidently overly emotional meeting of my family and hers. Charlie had followed. When they'd returned there was a storm about them. Everyone saw it. She was still attempting to ignore it. She didn't think she deserved Charlie, not a second time, not even the first time._

_I'd met Charlie's eyes over Bella's head as mother and daughter and my own Esme chatted quietly. In collusion, I'd lowered my look pointedly to the one woman he had only loved and gave him to know she was still his to have, to hold, love, honor…keep._

I grabbed another frame and rearranged Bella, slipping my fingers inside her channel and turning her on her side.

She collided with my mouth and pushed me away with, "Paint, lover."

Now she was marked with alizarin and cerulean.

And ivory.

And umber, burnt.

_Renee stayed. She could do that, for her man. _

I wanted to continue forever, right now, right here, in this moment.

A dip and draw, and her back. Bella's back. Bared. Nary an inch of skin I had not touched or kissed or licked or loved.

And her ass.

_Jesus_, her ass.

Like a peach, cleaved.

I hauled her upper leg up the top of the divan and stepped back to my easel and eased the slim line of her cleft as my fingers quavered, wanting to dip into the hot clamp of her domed ass.

She shot a look at me over her shoulder, and I captured it; capricious paramour.

"More," I stroked my jaw and ran my finger to my lips and groaned when her own fingers smoothed down her hip and over her behind, jerking up and pushing out and pursing and taking and raking me with her non-thoughts of wantonness.

"Mmmm," she hummed and held her tits to the cushions with her other hand and arabesqued her cunt astride her fingers so I could see every opalescence and shell and the creamy curls and drops coalescing, drawn out, like my moan.

Mopping the painting in front of me, I began to undress.

_Redress this situation._

Panting, wanting.

Taking, not talking, I dropped my jeans with a clatter of heavy coins in pockets and metal belt buckle to the floor and Bella's eyes currented to mine, "Edward!"

"I'm hot," I felt my thick hard-on and pulled my hand away.

"You are _not,_" she ingested all of me but focused on my cock.

Peeling away my shirt, I relished her languishing look. "I'm not?" _Oh, but I was… I felt like I was sweating, sweltering, heating up… human._ I fisted my dick and listed up and down until curlews of toxin dripped from me, "You make me feel hot, _Isabella._"

I knew exactly what my saying her full name did to her.

My breaths were lantern-laggard.

Jagged, dirty.

My thoughts scandalous.

I was over Bella and she was ready.

Then punching pulling thrusting.

Pushing.

"I'm gonna paint you."

"Yeah?" I held my base and split her labia again to our labored breaths.

"_Yes."_

On my knees, I dove into her, howling with her scorch-burn turning me inside out.

"Uh! No-yes-no-FUCK!"

"_Yesssss," _The stranded, strangling moan-groans and missteps gilded me.

There was nothing, there was nothing... there was eternity... there was this bliss.

Her shoulders soldered to my hands and my cock melded to her pussy, and her teeth tasted my throat and my neck breaking-ached back!

Then laughter, after.

Raindrops of titters and gut-deep chuckles took us and tucked us together.

Human warmth welted me; her breath pelted me in shivery smiles… the exquisite release of love speeding around us.

Folded into me, Bella twirled her fingers all over my chest and down my ribs and pulled back the sheet until she pressed the heel of her palm to my muscled abdomen and the ribbed slices that shadowed an arrow to my dick rising up to meet her.

Her giggles became struggles and my chuckles glugged in my throat.

Laughter, _after_, until she walked naked and resplendent and moon-imbued gorgeous from my bed to the easel and returned with two pots of paint so deeply unwashed they were near-neon in the dusk.

Laughter and anticipation made me suck in air and each ligature turn to noose-tightness as I watched her dip her fingers lasciviously into the pot of sky, dropping globs so they surrounded my pubic hair, and I hung onto the bed's slats like they could save me from her hedonistic chartreuse chanson.

Lifting my dick, she dabbled a nail like a rasping, newly reddened paintbrush down my beribboned hard-hard erection. She dropped splots of violet at each of my hipbones and along my thighs. She reached high to hold my cock to my stomach where it beat and thugged and tried to break free before she dribbled hues of magisterial colors to my scrotum and then a cold shock of cerise inside my foreskin she gently pulled back.

_Cold, even to me._

"Beautiful," she pronounced.

I wanted… _to pounce._

Every sinew inescapably rigid, my dick extended further than ever before, my arms keening to crack her to me, my cock wired to fuck inside her, my eyes made round plates and her platelets rounded bases and she took one photo while I thought…_"Fuck."_ Then Bella drew a steaming washcloth over me. Fondled me with the loops of material between my skin and her touch.

Teasing me mightily.

Making me itchy and rashy and rash and… _hot._

"I'm going to fuck you now," she made out against my stomach and my nipples and my mouth and settled down to ride me.

I never moved my hands from their ironside hold under the bed's edges.

Straining, I held still, desire a creeping masquerade over my face and frigid shivers down my body as she drove circles of Circean, circadian succubus sex around and on top and over my shaft, warm washcloth dampening the sheets at our side, her sex moistening the pistil thrust of me inside.

I hungered and growled and pained and she painted again with her hips and waist and tits bouncing, but I wouldn't break my bonds, I'd bite through my tongue and fist through the frame and rape the covers with my toes and push out pillows with my head, but I'd hold still and let her… _let her… let her have me._

"Have me now," she moaned and fell, her offering only a misstep because my venom had been tested against her blood and been found lacking, feeble…not with the correct chemistry to change her.

I could kill her.

I couldn't _have_ her.

I couldn't keep her, couldn't raise her from the catacombs.

_Have me!_

"Yes," I uttered and dove up inside her with nothing but my cock holding her in place, a tall sword lifting her and jostling her down, jousting and spinning and turning and twisting.

At the end all the colors blended together until all that was primary became one melded flesh and a permanence of soul seeking to break the universe's boundaries.

We couldn't move, but we shoved.

We couldn't speak, but we shushed and whispered and none of our words made any sense but all our half-spoken nonsense said everything.

_Love, have, take, kill, love, make, forever, end, together, be, please… be with me forever._

_Somehow._

_~~ll~~_

_He picked it up and turned toward home, but was suddenly seized with a longing for his father and mother. He did not venture to speak of this wish to his wife, yet by his grief and restlessness both she and her sisters instantly perceived his condition._

"Mase, huh?"

"Yes," I smiled… my boyish nickname on her lips inciting. I inclined Bella closer and skimmed my lips to her mouth, then her temple.

"I looked into them, Whit and Carty." She propped up on her elbows, hovering over me, her breasts beat-swags against me, _distracting._

Camellia-like nipples sang to my body and spliced me in two halves. _Have and hold._ I couldn't resist tasking them both with my thumbs and index fingers, rolling and pinching, watching a floridity fire up her breastbone over her neck to resonate in her cheeks.

"You did, _huh_?" Far too languorous to pay attention, I positioned her astride me and riled my dick against the wealthy banqueting pearls of her pussy, each glissade forward and back—from clitoris to ass—making a caramel-smelling web of transparent, fluid-like dewdrops weave our intimate bodies together.

Sampling to my shoulder, gnawing neglectfully on the ropes of muscle, _Isabella_ bent up over me and held me down, "Of course, baby. It's your _life._"

_She was my life._

_Wife… I couldn't contain the thought, but I fought to withhold the word._

"And our death," she reached into my hair and fought with the strands, strangling them.

"Carty Colter, Emmett's elder cousin, died in '26. Just a young man still… surviving the Great War to die in an explosion on home soil," my shoulders shook with something akin to sobs.

_Thick timepieces took sepia photos in flashes… sounds, words, motions, memories. Tall heads of beer in iced glasses and rapacious laughter in the background. Dim candlelit lanterns and the newness of electricity and automobiles. Off to war. All three of us. Juvenile, not one ounce ready. A new platform, another country. And innocence that would be tarnished._

_Them to trenchfoot, me to vampirehood._

"In Rockwood, Tennessee. He had a canary named Mimi of all things," the warm-sad-tinted smile on Bella's mouth whispered me forth. "She sputtered out from the fumes just as the gasses came upon them and the flash detonated the caves of the Roane Iron Company Coalmines. His remains were found covering, _protecting, _his fellow friend, Nelse Dale.

"They were recognized by their families through battle wounds they'd both incurred during their service in Europe."

I rocked her with me, remembering… _trying so hard to remember… Eliza, my mother… ice skating. A fountain and women's thoughts. My mother waiting outside the bathroom the first time I'd shaved with my father showing me how to bite down on my top lip and raise my throat up. The witch at the door I heard about when I was naught but an inkling in Eliza's womb. Doors closing, doors opening, broadsheets and the piano and dancing and love, and love and love and privilege._

_Seeing, always seeing, always seeing Isabella, in my dreams._

I rocked as she carried on.

"Whit only made it home resting under the Stars and Stripes." I shredded closer to my woman, hugging her for her warmth, her words and essence. "Jasper's relative, your mate, was killed in the line of duty during the Battle of Château-Thierry."

"I'm so glad you never made it to the war, Edward," her tears rained upon me and made me sink lower, the ends of her rainbow spirit dangled in the muddied puddles of my past.

"But how?"

"I know you're old and stuff, baby, but you _have_ heard of Google, right?" she half-jested.

"It can't be that easy," _it couldn't, could it?_

"Let's pretend, just for a moment, that it is," Bella ruled.

_Pretend, make-believe, fairy tales._

"Have you told Jasper and Emmett?"

She rested on me and wiped her eyes to the sheet I held up, "No, baby… I will if you want, but not without you there."

"Alright." My throat was scraped. Raw.

Her fingertip peregrinated and calmed my stubborn eyebrows to a straight line.

Soft as red cardinal feathers, Bella's lips drifted moist rumors against mine.

Trawling across me, Bella reached into her overnight bag and pulled out a long, black, velvet jewel box. She tugged out my hand and unlinked our fingers and kissed every crease and creased her brow as a few more salty drops dimpled down to the collapse of her mouth, "I found this too. It was bequeathed to your mother, Eliza Anis Anatolia at her birth, Elizabeth Anthony Masen at her death. I just put in the right names and dates."

Weakly, half-smiling, I copied, "Google?"

Languishing back in the balcony of my arms and lap, she let out a small laugh, "No, darling. Carlisle pointed me in the right direction, he was there then, after all; the Masens were prominent, very well known," her lips warbled as she didn't say aloud, _"Until your entire family died."_ "I imagined there must be something of your past, your family's wealth changing hands out there somewhere."

_Changing hands, just as I'd been handed over from Eliza and Edward John to Carlisle, then Esme, and now Isabella._

"I so badly wanted to give you…_anything_. Even this smallest part of your story." She sniffed and blew her nose into the handkerchief I offered, holding her face in one hand and collecting all her tears. "It was being auctioned at Sotheby's. I believe it belonged to your great grandmother, Louise Harriet Masen."

Bella sat to my side and cradled her knees and placed the case over me. Rushing, she looked aside, "I couldn't afford it. I took the liberty of asking Carlisle…"

I shook and righted myself and opened the dainty clasp.

We both gasped.

A crest…The Masen arms, held the locket closed. Sturdy, gold, strong on the outside, the first leaf opened to reveal a man I didn't recognize. The next slim layer nestled in a filigreed bower and when opened to the opposite side, it gave the minute portrait of…, "My father." My pinkie tip, the one on which sat his heavy ring like an old fashioned band linked to my stopped heart, delicately tried to touch his likeness. But my hands were too big, and for the first time I felt large and awkward, capable of shattering this gift with the merest crunch of hand or twist of wrist.

"And this," Bella steadied my hand and brought own, petite finger to the final picture, in the center of the opened triptych, "and this is you."

Older than I appeared in the picture from the fairgrounds with Lieselotte, I was materialized to look more like my father, there…side-by-side. The color near faded now, the copper penny of my hair and the old forest of my eyes, those things that had tied me to my mother, were bleeding away.

An engraving was on the back, s_o bright, it shone._

_My lover, Frederich_

_My grandson, Edward John_

_My handsome great grandson, Edward Anatolia_

_My loves_

_My life_

The ornament cuddled into my palm as I lifted my mother's ring on the chain about my neck and I tried to put all these disparate pieces of me together. Tinny and embossed and free-floating, memories pinched into focus and then dissolved away again.

Hours later we sat in a chair, next to a fire.

Still awake.

Touching.

Thinking.

Her first words in twenty minutes were quiet honesty, "You know, we all die."

_There's a possibility. For more._

I didn't answer, but cribbed her to me. Blanketed Bella. Kissed all over her face and just breathed.

Lachrymose.

Morose.

_Hopeful._

"I don't want to lose you," she sighed and began to droop into slumber.

"You won't." I decided.

"I don't want you to lose me." She hiccupped.

I hung my head and unclothed her elbow where the oystery skin looked like a scar, so shiny was it. My mouth to her, there… and turning interior to her breasts and filling myself with the woman-scent of her cleavage, I couldn't look at her.

Not then.

Because we both knew.

I would.

_Eventually._

"What happens when I die?"

"I'll die too." _Again, everlastingly._

"What happens when I grow old?"

I wanly softened my lips to her puckered nipple, "I'm far older than you."

The canvas of reality filled in. Snowing over us, throwing us together, faltering our mouths and overflowing, cramming, packing us tight until we spun out like fractured windows opened to sunrise that skirmished her downy pleasure to our shaking, crying, shouting, faceless belonging, _belonging believing bedeviled beings._

_Believe!_

_Believe._

_Live,_

_Be._

My ears were too warm and my breaths too shallow as I came and crowed and cranked and craned and collapsed.

Isabella.

She stole up me with her eyes widened.

Woke me up with her smile radiating. As in an abundant dream, she fingered first the russet forelock of my hair that felt damp, then the side of my face, and onto my ear, which felt sore from resting against her head.

There she stopped to fondle, her fingers teasing and toying and feeling the least of all hot, this time. More like lukewarm, possibly room temperature.

Outside my bedroom, beyond the windows and walls, the moon joked amidst scant, refracting clouds.

Inside, in my bed, I huddled closer to Isabella in search of her toastiness. Her bright curiosity a curio that had me listing closer, closer to the wonder in her low, loved-out voice, "Handsome man, you look…_cozy._"

_Ki shan i Romani- Adoi san' i chov'hani_

_Wherever gypsies go, There the witches are, we know._

_

* * *

_

~Theories? There are approximately three chapters to go and the epilogue~

Youth Without Age and Life Without Death resources:

www(DOT)polyvore(DOT)com/youth_without_age_life_death/set?id=12721442

www(DOT)childrenstories(DOT)ca/Stories/Youth-Without-Age-And-Life-Witho(DOT)html

_Dead Confederates_ has been nominated in the **Hidden Star Awards** for Best All Around…_weeeeeeeeee!_ Voting is 09-16 – 09-20 at:

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I'm taking part in the **Countdown to Halloween II: One Haunted Hallows Eve**, creepy and sexy oneshots will be posted (one+ for each day in October) starting the 1st. So put it on alert! It's not a contest, just some fun, and posts will be anonymous so y'all are gonna have to see if you can guess my occultist offering ;) www(DOT)fanfiction(DOT)net/s/6326403/1/

I'm now on **Facebook **(yes, Eddie still is too ;)). The link is on my profile. Teasers will be there, but please don't friend me unless you have a dedicated fanfic account, because I like to have fun too.

My Comuppance was 'trended' a couple weeks ago on **The Fictionators **by the delicious AmeryMarie :

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Cheers,

Rie~


	11. Divine

**Story notes: **It has been brought to my attention that I've crossed wires a few times. While I've maintained the Anatolia family is of Romany descent, I've used _Romanian_ language in some of their dialogue/thoughts. The two are separate: Romania is a country, the Romany are an ethnic gypsy minority of central and eastern Europe as well as the Americas and North Africa and the Middle East. The Anatolia family _did_ come to North America from Romania... The Youth Without Age fairytale is _not_ a Romany fairy tale, but a Romanian one. They knew of the fairy tale because it was indigenous to their country.

Romanys were a dark haired people; thus Eliza's coloring could be considered aberrant. Of course, rape and bastardy are common throughout history; who's to say there wasn't such an instance in the Anatolia's past, you know, redheaded stepchild and all that ;).

Heaps of appreciation to my lovely betas, Viola Cornuta and Vanessarae. Extra special love and hugs to Viola for helping me so much with content on everything I write, and specifically for finding the John Donne quote for me :).

Disclaimer: Not mine.

~~Many, many thanks for the reviews! They are truly inspiring~~

Song:

youtube(DOT)com/watch?v=HDi9PxwPOx0

_The Man Who Played God_, Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Ten: Divine**

**Carlisle Cullen**

_Death be not proud, though some have called thee  
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe,  
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,  
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill mee.  
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,  
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,  
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,  
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.  
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,  
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,  
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,  
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?  
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,  
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die._

~_Death Be Not Proud_, John Donne

I'd sworn never to change another.

_Change_, I sneered. The word was too pleasant. What I'd done was annihilate in the vein of re-creation.

I'd taken a wrecking ball to both Edward and Esme.

After watching him limp and coil, howl and beat and become little more than savage, I'd decreed to never make another of our kind.

Because this life, with no one, was no kindness.

In the main, my patients, my colleagues revered me, far too much. They had no idea I was a brute monster with killer instincts. They had no understanding I was here, as a physician, to lay upon a bed of nails, to douse myself in the flames burning up the insides of my esophagus, to whip myself with my want and make atonement for all I had bred… in my likeness.

They idolized me… as if I were a god.

I was no more than Lucifer.

Lazarus may have risen, yet I was riddled with holes that grounded me, let wind whistle through me instead of lifting me.

My offspring were two.

My children were five.

My wife, my mate, my love…_Esme._ She was the one.

As Bella should be for Edward.

Certainly, Emmett, Rosalie, Alice, and Jasper didn't go out of their way to make themselves humble before me. Usually they jested about my… earnestness, erudition, my staunch dedication to education. My punctuality in all things.

I knew, behind my back, they even called me 'anal'.

If retentive impulseswere what it took to keep this ark safe, then it didn't much matter what they said.

A boom from downstairs said Emmett was home.

I grinned.

A scattering, lilting laughter… peels of a campanile and a low twang filtered from the second floor. And thus I knew my children Alice and Jasper would take up the night with their lovemaking.

Rosalie's footsteps were soft as deer pads, and her touch on the banister like butterscotch melting. Her heart was so heavy in its absence. Only the uncanny openness of her husband could make her forget, smile, _be_.

Edward came in.

A worrying frost of noise trying to be silent. He touched everything Isabella had ever run her fingertips over in these past weeks, up the steps. He stopped at the mirror on the landing.

I heard a scratch like chalk to blackboard, as if he was erasing himself, then a groan, and heavy—unnaturally so—footsteps up to the next level.

Almost everyone was here, inside our home.

I imagined warm braziers, and the kindling fires throughout the household lit in each bedroom.

This was a boon.

Now Bella was missing.

And Esme.

_My woman._

I slipped to the door and peered to the hall, the glow of dotted sconces lighting the rich wallpaper.

I couldn't smell her inside.

Only Emse knew me. As I was, layered in the toxic paint of all I wanted—to be a model father and doctor, to know my family was secure, to ensure Edward and Bella's disparate species and paradoxical stories would not cause the untimely demise of one or the other.

With the relief of being what I was, instead of the philanthropic do-gooder of Forks that its citizens took me for, I soared back across the study as if wings beat out of my shoulders instead of walking at a curiously slow and gentle pace I'd never gotten used to, not even after nearly four hundred years.

With her usual flirtatious cadence, Esme would always soothe me back to our own semblance of normalcy after a day, two days, four days of non-stop work at the hospital where I was only one third of myself. She'd part her delicious pink lips in a wicked grin and look at me with teasing coyness as she rubbed my shoulders from the strain of my guise. The practitioner capable of partitioning off his other inglorious desires. And then she'd laugh so throatily I'd do nothing but groan and straighten under her touch as her hands swept in arcs down my back to land on my backside with a squeeze and a tug lower at my scrotum, "Welcome home, heartthrob."

How she would love to tease me about the admiring stares, the hypnotized awe that followed me, the matrons and young ladies alike—I never noticed, but she did. Thriving off the immutable fact I'd never looked to a woman as I did her.

She'd draw her full breasts against me and tug me down by the hair at my nape, a familiar sensual pain escaping me in a moan, "You need a break." She would reach around my front and dandle the flat of her palm over my stomach, onto my erection, "You need to let loose your beast."

With the advent of Bella, the atmosphere within our home had both blossomed with her hummingbird human heartbeat-winging joy and lustful repletion inside Edward—and curdled with an encroaching fear he didn't want to confront just yet. Too many conflicting emotions wafted like stormy air whirling up to topple over a cloudless, sunny day. Because his dainty lover, the woman he'd sought from one decade to the next, would surely die.

Or, as was prophesied, he would. At her touch.

Amongst this palpable longing and hope and two existences bound to be injured yet more, Esme had recently bade me, baited me, taunted me for three days until I could no longer see straight for the length of her curved calf, the side view of a half-bared breast, the lick of her lips over my nude torso, refusing me release until I'd been blind with my own sluggish, indecent lust.

Moaning, mirroring the motion of her hands curled around my shaft, I'd thrust my hips up and down, grabbed her brown and blond locks and made her mouth mesh against the long side of my cock.

She'd grinned up at me, her pointed tongue licking a slick line up to my tip that was apoplectic with imminent explosion… then sat aside, slapping my thigh and wiping her mouth, sexily sniffing at my scent all over her fingertips.

"Esme, bloody hell!" I'd twisted the already-tangled bedlinens until my hand meandered of its own volition toward my erection, "Are you trying to kill me? Why do you tease me so, woman?"

My voice had been nothing smooth or mesmeric, just one long guttural exclamation of need. _I'd nearly called her 'wench'. _

Smacking my hand away, she'd leapt over me with her breasts hovering over my mouth. She'd lowered one dusky, swollen nipple to my mouth. I'd opened and pushed her forward with my knees at her back. Dipping, she'd drizzled her peaked flesh to my lips then smashed her tit into my mouth so I'd sloppily sucked and wet and bit and licked.

Then she'd jumped off me again, "You need to get away, lover." She'd quirked her head, "And I'm absolutely fine with using my _feminine wiles_ to get my way." She still found amusement over my old country turns of phrase.

Just as fresh as she'd been when I met her the first time; my scared young girl who'd been beaten by her father.

Even then, her light had been undimmed.

In the following years, that hurricane lamp housing her soul had cracked, but it'd never broken.

Could I deny her?

Had I ever been able to?

Wincing as I'd rolled over off the bed to the balls of my feet, I'd stopped in front her, stroking over my shaft, knowing I could get to her just as she did me, "You're saying you won't _fuck me_ unless I get away from here?"

She'd gulped and nodded, staring well below my face.

"Did you really think it necessary to tempt me to the point of priapism to get me to agree?"

At that, Esme had thrown her head back with a flume of laughter, "No, sweetheart, I just like to provoke you."

Unmentionably tight with need for both blood and sex, I'd practically thrown Esme out the door, slamming it with an unlikely shout, "We'll be back tomorrow. And have no doubt, _children_, I will be calling into Forks High to make sure you were all in attendance."

Curses cut short their self-congratulations.

We kept a close rein on them all; there was no other way our subterfuge could work. As it was, we were nearing another move. We'd been here too long, lingering in hopes the second time we'd been drawn to this locale, we'd be shown the face of Edward's love.

And we had.

But what was to come of it all?

"Don't think about it now, Carlisle," Esme had stroked my thigh and urged me on to our seclusion.

Out on the hunt, in Southern California's Sespe Wilderness, I'd shrugged out to the top of a shelf of sandstone that rippled like waves over a seashell, spotting Esme yards away in the middle of the ochre and rust-colored mesa.

I had no recourse but to stop. _Just stand still._

Esme's mannerisms had been flawless, seamless as she cooed to the leggy coyote clutched in her embrace. I'd found myself swelling in watching her marzipan-pink lips pull at the life vein in its taut, tan neck.

Bleak brush and even more naked trees with bark of windswept silver seemed to shudder at this show of primal majesty.

The dense atmosphere had crackled with tangible intensity, flashing from her feminine form. Even nature had been in awe of her; the quick, slate gray of low clouds racing across what had been a clear, blue sky. Made into Artemis, huntress, hunkered low and lethal atop the coyote's splayed open neck while she'd devoured, gluttonously, eviscerating capillaries, masticating pulp, noisily but precisely slurping. My shaft had shaken as a whippet of blood splashed across her cheek-in the same manner my cum was known to do when she allowed me to fuck her genteel mouth with her sex hovering over my head, making me splatter into her open lips and up on her body.

Electricity, flashes of Apollionic, orange-red hybrids had eroded time and place. Candlewick locks whipped a heathenish storm of famine relieved as Esme'd looked to me with her eyes, midnight domes only lit by the crescent of her pupils. The smack of her lips, the snap of hell-weather had transported me back to the time when I'd taken her life and given only my love in return.

It had hardly seemed a fair barter.

First fragile, delicate ache, aroused gratitude, patriarchal pleasantries… denial. Refutation I wore habitually about me like a horse-hair under-vest, hiding my passion, flogging myself for it. Wanting, waging, waiting. I'd disclosed only humility and a sire's presumptuous, perfectly appointed, puritanical amour.

Armor.

The second time I'd been with her, a nude paramour, she had come to me in our staunchly human abode. Edward had championed her connubial interest in me, making it clear I was being a jackass for continually denying her. Slaking off desperate need, I'd wrapped her in my smoking jacket; the exact shade of misty blue I remembered her mortal eyes to be, made a pleasing, teasing jacquard as I wore it over my bared flesh.

She'd taken the robe in two hands and pushed it back off behind her, over her shoulders so it sat for a mere moment upon her buttocks before simpering in a sumptuous satin fold to the floor at our feet.

I'd paced away. I wanted to run. To her, from her.

She'd advanced.

I'd held my hands up, because… because Esme didn't owe me this, and I'd make do with loving her from afar. With loving her in the only manner I knew how. With esteem, regard. Even though we'd already come together, I didn't believe I was owed her womanly love.

Bursting with ecstasy, a courtesan, she'd torn off my drawers and given no further opportunity for my withdrawal.

Offensively, I'd felt the ignoble reaction of my penis sliding in and out of her unpracticed fists. Ostensibly, I'd meant to push her away but ended with my chin to my hurdy-gurdy chest, tugging the carnation bud of her lips back and forth over my solid flesh where drips and drops of lacquered venom pearled.

Hungry, untutored, I'd lapped her breasts, crying from my gullet when I met the points with my tongue, a sharp rasp upon a work of art!

Though I was older in many ways, she had been more learned in fleshly knowledge. I'd lived chastely as a young human man, prudishly as a lone vampire. Esme had known sex, but never pleasantly in the villainous arms of Charles Evenson.

That she'd had the strength to fly from him gave merit to her Athena-like spirit.

Aliform creature from cretin.

And when she'd lost her newborn child, the River of Styx was all she'd wanted; her hope solidified into a channel of miasmic swamp infested with cruelty, death.

The stream of release, the path to Nirvana before her had been dammed, damned, and barren. I'd played God, Zeus. I'd interrupted her journey.

I owed her the hereafter.

And the resuscitation of my heart.

The resurgence of my soul.

When I'd loved her that next time, it was with spirit and flesh. With corporeal feeling jerking out of me in ropes and spindles… of cum, of love, of heart… of onus.

Forged, soldered, chained as if by the iron workings of Hephaestus himself in his warlock's cave, we were never to be parted. _Never_.

A primordial surge then slingshot me through the elastic dominion of ages. To mate again, to possess and be owned; equally, animally, specially.

The wide, gateless heavens had surrounded us on all sides. Inside the acres of Sespe's unbroken landscape, the sky's curse tumulted to a glowing-green and rose-colored, imperfect blessing crashing through with jags of platinum lightning. A climatic, cataclysmic orchestra with her clashing witchery, Mother Nature's haunting melody had punctured the feral Dance of Seven Veils as I'd gained on my quarry, my love, my equal in all things.

A whirling dervish of clay topsoil had spun up around us, shawling us in a tornadic helix upheaval of limbs twisting, clothing shredded like no more than cattail's fluff to the gale-like wind we'd created. Mouths plundered manically, and I'd sought out the last crimson drops of the hunt's blood inside Esme's wet cavern wherein her teeth nipped my tongue. Crossing the firmament of my lips to deep within, Esme's weighty, drenched muscle tangled with mine, wrestling lusciously for just one… more… drop of replenishment that fervored us into an even more frantic frenzy.

The zephyrs had dropped like languorous, carnelian silk scarves to the earth leeched of its desert color.

Sallying forth, Esme had toppled me over in one lithe motion of prowess, steel, and suppleness. Caramel cream from the top of her starlet hair, now a maddened fury of webs wefting over her face, to her round, womanly breasts tipped in plush, pink nickels, down her wrought-from-feather flesh, the sexual cage of her ribs robbing me of breath. Her navel was a divot that opened to the size of my pinky, the lance of my tongue.

Following a small swell, my eyes, my lips, my fingers had craved to the fine down of her pubic hair; toffee, sleek with dampness I'd gathered on the tip of my tongue, the pad of my thumb. The tight drum of her belly tilted like saucy windmills weeping water out down below and my own spout opened with infinitesimal liquidity. Lapping, lathing, completely bound and enslaved, I'd melted against her with my mouth to her labia, slipping into and around all her grooves. I'd collided my face with her inner thighs, just wishing I had a beard's growth to twitch and rasp and burn her skin. A mustache to find purchase with subtle stubble at the nose of her clitoris.

And her legs.

Never was I so glad for the changing of generations than when Esme could display those lengths of muscle and softness to my heated perusal. Not only at night, but out in the open, during the day. The turn of her limbs turned me inside out: the clamp of calf, the sinew of thigh, the tenderness behind her knee, the strap of her ankle winking at me.

I'd kissed every surface until she'd beseeched.

There, we'd embraced fear and deviant decadence birthed from decades of loneliness and supernatural carnality. There, in the dust bowl arena our pouncing, naked bodies had created, with rocky promontories topped by sparsely-needled pine sentinels overlooking us, we would rightfully terrify the voyeuristic human eye.

There in that coliseum, we'd wrestled and mated like a god to his goddess, snakes braiding, limbs like constrictors, my adder cock to her mamba sway; we were of earth, sky, and cosmos–sucking out the atmosphere, creating a guttural, groaning, heaving, bestial crash of sandstorm, a demonic tsunami of fucking that ended only when silence-utter stark silence-bashed us together in orgasm like the supersonic boom of the Black Hole imploding.

There we were vampire, hunters, primeval, uncivilized.

At home we were mother, father… husband, wife… lovers.

To each other, we were solace.

And for just a few moments, we'd let go the crushing sickness of how we had to act in order to blend in and maintain, the thick indigestion that was now settling over us at the razorback road Edward was walking, on his own, one more time.

In a final effort to keep the carefree feeling we'd remembered on our two day stint, I'd swatted and pinched Esme's bottom before opening the door to our home in Forks, announcing, "Hi, kids! We're home!"

Two weeks ago, that had been.

Since then, I'd both spoken to and met Chief Swan. I'd found his questions at once humorous… and hurtful.

I had swallowed my pride and pushed eavesdropping Edward away and answered everything I knew of our ability to procreate with human beings.

Renee had come to us as well. My heart, what was there, still residing (I believed) swelled with remembering her. Her uneasiness had given way to understanding, and then to anointment. And finally, to regaining her own love.

_Her_ spirit would never be dampened.

She had that in common with her daughter.

In seeking answers to the motility of Edward's ejaculate to Bella's fertility, I'd also been quietly asked to investigate his venom to her blood. He hadn't wanted to know. _He had to know._

Putting on specs I didn't need, out of habit alone, I'd gone over the results with Edward. He couldn't impregnate her, as a vampire. Neither was he capable of changing her. His dream Isabella had been a human girl; his mate Bella must remain so.

_So it was done._

All those stories and legends and predictions turned to stone tablets.

I was no closer to the answer… _how could Bella possibly end Edward's life. _Unless she was a witch? I left off a dark chuckle at that thought.

Just two weeks, and Edward had become exponentially animated in Bella's company, increasingly inanimate without her. A switch had flipped, and it continuously blinkered on and off.

Emmett mocked.

Jasper gleaned, a frown creasing his brow and highlighting his scars, all he'd been through to get to Alice. Yet they'd made it.

Another bolt to Edward's medieval stocks.

_Because he and Bella wouldn't._

Rosalie sighed loudly, often. She lashed out at the least little thing, at once perturbed by the young woman in our fold, jealous of her life's force, always tuned into what she'd been made to give up… unwilling to let another go the same route.

To Esme, I asked every day, "Has he approached you?"

The weight of her maternal fatigue made her head drop and her shoulders droop, "Not yet." Rolling back up and ready to fight, make right, she'd say, "He never really came to me about Bella, in all that time. _You know this inside and out, Carlisle._" _I didn't._ She would resume, ignoring my silent denial, "You were his touchstone in that moment, those memories, that last image he saw when he became your son." She always gave me more credit than I was owed. She'd shake her head and another tress of hair would come between us until I'd hold it away, loop it behind her ear, swoop in to kiss her cheek to her temple, "He and I are friends. Edward is my son, too. But it's you he looks to, darling."

The pain coming off him was only mitigated by the pleasure radiating from him.

Thus, he was going to come asunder.

"You don't have all the answers, you're not invincible," Esme would sit next to me and clutch us together as we rocked over the love and horror to come to our child.

But I _was_… invincible.

And I needed Edward to be, too.

Better yet, Bella.

A door shifted closed, the lock snipped. Esme was home. With each brush of her presence, I gathered breath, seeing her hips sway in my mind with each slow, silken step—even with her nature, she never hurried—stopping at every place Edward had touched on his way up.

I would look to Alice, but she held no answer in her riddles, "They won't be, _but they will be,_ Carlisle." Her stillness like a compass pointed towards Edward and Bella's magnetic north every time she focused on them.

_There was only so much I could do, and it wasn't enough._

Huddling over my books, I forested through pages at a rapid pace**:**

"_In the Vile," says Dr. Krauss, "also known as Samovile, Samodivi, and Vilevrjaci, we have near relations to the forest and field spirits, or the 'wood-' and 'moss-folk' of Middle Germany, France, and Bavaria… while in certain respects they have affinity with the Teutonic Valkyries." Yet they differ on the whole from all of these, as from English fairies, in being more like divinities, who exert a constant and familiar influence for good or evil on human beings, and who are prayed to or exorcised on all occasions. They have, however, their exact parallel among the Red Indians of North America as among the Eskimo, and it is evident that they are originally derived from the old or primeval Shamanic faith, which once spread all over the earth."_

"_Incarnation of beauty and power. Implacable in their wrath to all who deceive them, or who break a promise. Hence the proverb applied to any man who suddenly fell ill: "Naiso je na vilinsko kolo" ("He stepped on a fairy-ring")."_

My eyes faded, as if I was capable of exhaustion.

Having all a man could want, I was powerless. To give life or death made me not a savior but a devil. Granting this endlessness on one who might never find their match made me the grimmest of reapers.

In the Chicago infirmary, Edward had been so close to death, I'd smelled the musty air inside a coffin enfolding him in a shroud. He'd killed. The young man with cheeks as flushed as the skin of autumn's apples, with bronzed hair and fern eyes had been transformed to a murdered under my hand, my teeth.

There'd be no progeny from my family.

When we died—and I believed we all would eventually; our immortality was only as guaranteed as not having our bodies dismembered and our torn-off parts ignited—there'd be no remembrance. Not that I wanted history books written on me, or statues or paintings made in my likeness.

No, like Rosalie, I dreamed still about my lapsed humanity, my lack of begetting, of legacy. Of children who would be born of flesh from the womb, to grow and live and age and procreate their own lineage.

The one of us who'd lost so much, Esme, had already found her heaven in this strange and lovely and weird family…_family._ We all belonged to her. _If only she could create our happiness_; that was her wish.

Alice's desires began and ended with Jasper. Not in simplicity, but in completion.

Unable to forget the wrong he'd perpetrated, the thousands he'd massacred, Jasper himself would have liked forgiveness; and that was an ounce of humanity he'd never grant himself.

Emmet—I smiled—took every possible variation of life and death thrown at him and volleyed back with a force like nature. Unreserved in his enjoyment, his virility, his _being._ But what he wanted most of all was to make Rosalie at peace.

And without a child, he could never accomplish that.

Edward?

He wanted Isabella.

He didn't find her. Worse than that, he lost her when his ability to sleep had vanished into the thinnest, most forlorn air.

He'd absconded, in 1927.

How many days? How many months? How many calendars had I crossed off in my mind and in my desk blotter?

A snowy, parched-of-sun-day, had found him knocking at the door. _Knocking, _for Christ's sake, as if he hadn't been our son. Timid and unsure, with the most thirsting eyes, the most turned down lips, he'd been certain Esme and I would spurn him. He'd handed a volume to Esme as she'd reached out to him. Her fingers had glassed over his back, he was already on his way down the frosty steps toward the thoroughfare.

Believing himself aberrant.

"I'm so wrong," his voice had corroded.

His eyes, when he'd stomped away, looking back, were lit with red as if the Earth's core resided therein.

He'd broken down; I'd seen him sob like that before… with no tears, just an immortal punishment that would never be solaced, centuries of solitude unfolding before him.

Equally macabre and just, the first edition of _The Pied Piper_he'd gifted to Esme held Edward's elegant script inside, notating the date of Charles Evanson's death at his hands. Inside though, where a clover was pressed, in the middle, there was a more dedicated verse to Esme's babe, Annaliese Carolla_: In life she would have been fair and lovely, in her death, she brought __**me**__ a mother. In mourning, I thank her._

Always his friend, Esme had soothed his brow of filigreed snowflakes turning to ice crystals beneath her touch and brought him inside.

Every misdeed begged retribution.

Now, Edward was nearing that breaking point again.

Most recently, he'd come to me as he used to, in those early decades. Amongst all those countless sleepless nights we'd survived by planning a way to find his watery vision of Isabella.

This time it was After Bella. A.B.

"She's anxious." He'd pulled up the club chair and tore across his face.

I'd been remiss. I'd allowed him to think I never thought of Isabella in all those doomed years between then and now. It had been a gross miscalculation on my part to believe he'd move on if I neglected to feed his reverie.

A wieldy hurt waved up my spine and spread around to my front to land exactly where my ventricles used to push out blood when in a living organ.

I rubbed my chest, observing Edward doing the same.

"And you?" I'd queried—although I loved the young woman and the way she brought _life_ into Edward, my responsibility lay toward him.

Fetally, he'd circled in upon himself with hands below his knees, his chest to his thighs.

The murk of his timbre was darker than ever, "She cannot be mine, she cannot be mine, she cannot be mine."

Believing every word he uttered to be truth, I'd patted his head and maintained my stoicism to deliver, "_Yes._ Yes, she can. We _will_ find a way."

I'd depart with the truth I knew, just to see hope shine like a lantern from his eyes.

He'd stood and swayed and swooped under the low Victorian doorway, "I'm going to see her now."

Pressing him away with my hands to air, I'd lingered over the subtle respiration left in his absence, his presence. As if my son had taken his lover's body inside him.

Bending forward, pressing away the too-human cotton wool inside my brain, remembering that Edward had gone to Bella that night, that Wednesday night, and they'd returned, and they'd both been at rights, I reached blindly and grasped a book, its fine leather and tooled gilt like Braille to my fingers.

I reached back to my shoulders where the pain spread like a virus I shouldn't know.

_I needed to figure this out._

A ray of light from the long hall punctured my library and gave way to Esme's diaphanous form.

Her walk upstairs had been slow, guided as if by a wake. Her footsteps had taken her past my door and to our bedroom. The sigh of cloth coming away from her body had gained my attention.

As stunning as a goddess, _always,_ we'd aged together. Though our flesh never showed it, our burdens did.

My coquettish lover, my wife, the mother of this clapped-together fairground, sideshow troupe, Esme raised her arm to the pilaster so the side of her robe slid off her shoulder, inviting me.

Deep of voice and deceptive of tone, she demanded, "Put your books away now, Carlisle."

I attempted to ignore the manner in which her short skirting layered lustily over the thighs that wrapped about me each night.

_There was a solution… I just had to find it, for Edward. For Bella._

Her fingertips deft in my hair, caresses that made me cry for more, lean back, ball my hands to the armrests, so neglectful under her stroke I let the encyclopedia flitter back over the three hundred pages I'd memorized in the last twenty minutes.

"You need this," she opened the ribbon and let it loose from three hoops, a corkscrew of silk to the Oriental rug beneath her bare feet.

A low-hanging breast in bared ivory, a perfectly lifted nipple in rose and camellia. Bottom heavy and luscious, this was a mound meant for sex, made to make life, to suckle and nip and suck and… _God, only she made me say it and think it…, "_Fuck."

I moaned inside the sumptuous hill, biting my lips and frowning, _she always made me feel so out of control, beyond my wits, in need, on fire, so full of desire I could eat her raw._

"Some way or other… he'll be fine… you think he came all this way just to lose her?" She cupped my jaw and rimmed my lips, teasing me with her tongue and silencing vision with her sloping bosom, "You think I don't know how you feel?" Esme pressed my palm to the niche I'd carved out of her. "He's _my son_, my brother… _he's our firstborn_." Fingers softly plaited my hair and then held hard, "He's going to _live, _like we couldn't."

Pleading with my breath, I howled.

We weren't going to make it to the bedroom.

Lifting Esme, I escaped through window; the splat of light rain made starlit ingresses over her nude body.

The river widened, burbled… _the stream behind our house lived._

Bubbles tickled my ankles, calves and thighs while I waded in. Her hands unbuckled me furiously.

Knee deep in the creek, the river foamed like wild horses unharnessed with our depravity to have one another.

To forget.

_To live._

Esme javelined away, to the misting waterfall drowning out my roar.

She smirked, licked her lips, placed her hands on her hips and widened her legs in invitation.

I sprang out of my clothes and towards her, beneath the neat and naughty cascade of water I feel to her.

Fathomed the leagues beneath her feet.

Her hair was golden brown and perfect like fragrant sunflowers.

The clap of water splashed, and I dashed lower and I wanted only to know her.

My wife, my mate, she who had given everything up and jumped.

The lump in my throat closed in and pounded, not for blood... for love.

For her love.

Her.

_And love._

I ran. Always, in my head, without her touch on my arm, I ran.

Boiled.

Broiled.

I ran from the Lord and pleaded, and I was on my knees and the stream and the pool and the fall, and I fell and I fell and I prayed, like I used to.

Esme, nude, a beatitude, a constellation of nebulous nakedness called to me.

_Power._

Howl and growl and she held me down and lifted me up, and I'd been nothing, just nothing without her.

Ever.

Rain, water, chords and songs and simplicity and minute looks and, "I need you."

"I need you so hard."

"I need you now."

"Don't run, we did this."

"I died, died again at your hands."

The rock blasted apart, and the cascading water bled and ran all over me, and her heart stopped and it murdered me.

_Her heart had stopped at my hand, and it had killed me in its divinity._

My Lord, he gave me up.

Gave me up and stomped me down and I was part of the ground, and I was the mountain's glacial melt and I yelled and held and took, and gave; and my love, my woman, Esme...

She ringed down in her carillon voice and her toffee eyes, and her powerful hips slipped like a prow to me and I was in her and all...

Mizzen.

Muddled.

Clear and mast.

_And mating.  
_

And the strings of her legs and thighs were wide and then tight and nothing moved. But I moved, and Esme was imbued with that diamond, charcoal, dusty, glittery light.

And she was me.

And I was her.

And we were here.

And I was in.

And she was holding me.

And I was trying to yell, _scream_.

It boiled... her and me.

Hot, cold and dead and fire and gone.

Long gone.

And new.

Us.

I thrust and cried and held and begged and plied and lunged and fucked and tasted and took and gave and under and in and over and in and licked and cupped and ended... ended... we... we... we were ended.

And just beginning.

_And she accepted all of me._

In the jerk of my hips and the solder of her scream, in the rough of my cumming inside her.

Wet, pleasantly bared, clothes left shredded on the riverbed to be tumbled like gems down to the ocean, we lagged against one another through the crunch of growing sleet.

"_There's more. She'll save you. She'll save you again."_

"What?"

Inside, I locked the doors. Just a human notion. If one of our breed wanted in, a turn of key wouldn't stop them.

"Hmmm?" Had I spoken?

Everyone else was awake, of course, at their own devices. I didn't listen too hard, just enough to know that three other couples were somewhere about the house.

"You said, 'She'll save you'.'"

I placed my forefinger to her mouth, the enunciation from her lips gave me to understand Eliza Masen's celestial annunciation, "Eliza had said that, when she'd died. I'd always though she was referring to Edward and Isabella." I took Esme to our room and turned down the lamps, wishing candles were still in style so I could watch the flame's shadow dance across her body.

Hunkering over her, stroking her face and readying to make love again, I knew, "She'd been talking to me. _Of you… _to me."

In bed with mounds of coverings on top of us, we didn't feign sleep, but rejoiced in the silence that begat only murmurs, muffled half-thoughts, limbs parting and sighing voices, endearments in the dead dark.

_~~ll~~_

I came to from a glorious respite with a start.

_My son. My only son._

_Knocking, pounding, pummeling, beating._

_Edward!_

He'd come to life with Bella.

But he'd never be able to have her as I did Esme.

My boy, he'd entered our family, finally, with her at his side.

Yet, inside, he was torn through, still and again, and I couldn't reassure him.

_Pounding, shredding, tearing, knocking._

My heart?

Esme sat up, the sand-colored linen tucked under her breasts.

Like a man, I was helpless but to finger her budding nipples.

"Not now, Carlisle," Esme scorned.

This pounding wasn't my shaft, this beating-screaming-crying wasn't our pulses… it was footsteps running in an un-rhythmed key, it was a voice keening.

The door blew open and banged back on its spritely hinges.

Framing Isabella.

Wrapped in a sheet, just like Esme.

"He's fucked up," she announced, the blanched landscape of her face a pained montage.

I wheeled back from her curse until Esme pulled me back up, "Get used to it, lover."

Strong of body and intention, she stood.

She looked back, admonishing me.

I scurried into my pants, under the covers, "Where is he?"

"Bedroom." Bella was wild, worried, wide-eyed, frantically motioning us to follow her.

I raced ahead and was at the side of his bed before Bella even walked down the hall.

I called back to her, "He's not well."

Her tone both scared and confident, "I already told you that."

There were small heaps of black dust beneath his eyelashes, closed in repose. There was the mask of clammy sweat over his brow.

He jerked and tossed off the sheets, and Bella replaced them, pressing her palms to his chest and whispering, "Carlisle and Esme are here now."

In an unawake state, his forearm wound around Bella, and his color tainted back to normality, his seizures ceased.

His eyelids fluttered, his voice sounded drunken, "Mmmm, okay, love… Isabella."

Fright fought with ownership in her own glance to me.

I could only agree; this wasn't right. He looked too much like that young man carved inside out by the arching agony of influenza.

"I'll be in my study," I stated. A harsh decree that made Esme take my hand and place it into Edward's lax palm. I recoiled from his touch. She pulled me back, curling our fingers together around the clench his fist made as another perplexing convulsion shuddered through his formidable body. On the other side of the bed, Bella begged me with eyes so soft, knowing… weary and wise, and her whisper, "Not now, Carlisle. Not already. Not so soon." Her knees met the floor and she tenderly stroked his ratcheted shoulder through the seizing until he relaxed again with a groan, turning towards her.

To anyone who would listen, Bella chose her words, "Please. Not now."

Leaning over, I tapped her back, asking for her attention, "No. It won't be now, Bella. I promise."

Standing, I faltered. Bracing myself, I moved through something that was called life, reaching out to bat the ghosts and legacies and legions whose invisible gargoyle and ghoulish forms sat about the chamber in wait.

At the doorway, Emmett lowered his head and punched his knuckles to his eyes.

Rosalie was on her haunches just outside, a huddled mass of loss.

Alice paced up and down, giving no answers, but meeting my eyes and impelling me on.

Jasper sat at the bottom step of the staircase leading up to my den. The clarity of his wounds this night was as stunning as a meteor shower on skin. His lips held a divisive frown, but the amber of his eyes was brilliant with empathy. He shook as another cry came out from Edward's room, but he stood and clapped my back.

Esme had bested me upstairs.

Only she was half smiling.

I sank to the wall, "What?"

"This is just the beginning, my gentle man."

* * *

~Well, then. We're nearly there, ladies! Let me know what you think~

Excerpt from Dr. Krauss can be found here (with thanks to Rowan Moon who passed this on to me):

istina(DOT)rin(DOTru/eng/para/text/619.(DOT)html

**I'm taking part in the Countdown to Halloween II: One Haunted Hallows Eve, **_creepy and sexy_ oneshots will be posted (one for each day in October) starting the 1st. So put it on alert! It's not a contest, just some fun, and posts will be anonymous so y'all are gonna have to see if you can guess my occultist offering ;) www(DOT)fanfiction(DOT)net/s/6326403/1/ link is also on my profile.

Several of my stories are up for **Immortal Sin Awards** at the Darkest Temptation blog. Voting ends 10-15. darksper(DOT)blogspot(DOT)com/2010/10/voting-is-now-open-for-immortal-sin(DOT)html Best Dark Fem (RWaC—Alice), Craziest MoFo (RWaC—Caius) & Tigresse, Best Darkward (Surrender, yay!), Creative Kill (Tigresse), Death Scene (Tigresses).


	12. Death

So very much love and appreciation to my wonderfully talented betas: Viola Cornuta and Vanessarae!

Disclaimer: I do not own Twilight.

Many thanks to all of you lovely readers and reviewers! Special ta to Navarre; you've not only been an inspiration with your thoughtful comments, but you've also given me the poem for this chapter. Much love to winterstale for her friendship, her dedicated hand holding, and for the feats of google fuckery she performed for me for this chapter, and a big fat red kiss to Rowan Moon who is my original goddess.

~~From the Divine to Death~~

Song:

_Shoes Watch, _An Horse

www . youtube . com/watch?v=aCPBo6kDBIU

* * *

**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Eleven: Death**

**Bella Higgin Swan**

_Take this kiss upon the brow!  
And, in parting from you now,  
Thus much let me avow-  
You are not wrong, who deem  
That my days have been a dream;  
Yet if hope has flown away  
In a night, or in a day,  
In a vision, or in none,  
Is it therefore the less gone?  
All that we see or seem  
Is but a dream within a dream._

_I stand amid the roar  
Of a surf-tormented shore,  
And I hold within my hand  
Grains of the golden sand-  
How few! yet how they creep  
Through my fingers to the deep,  
While I weep- while I weep!  
O God! can I not grasp  
Them with a tighter clasp?  
O God! can I not save  
One from the pitiless wave?  
Is all that we see or seem  
But a dream within a dream?_

_~ A Dream Within a Dream, _Edgar Allen Poe

_**~~A Nightmare~~**_

Carlisle looked—_God-_he looked sallow.

Barely able to lift my head, I was still capable of reeling back, flattening myself to the headboard, hunkering like a gargoyle just above Edward's head; that fine, handsome face he hadn't lifted since last night.

It was midday, the third day, since I'd called the family to his bedside.

And Carlisle looked like… _death warmed over and served up on a platter._

I hissed and shook my matted hair out, clapping my pointed fingers into Edward's unmoving shoulders, a deathly shroud turning me from human being to cagy, wild witch.

_I didn't like his look._

Energized, adrenaline pumping through me, I pressed out my hand, seeking to silence his words.

As if my motion had affect, Carlisle's Adam's apple bobbed tight in his throat and worked double time to get noise out of his mouth.

Low and raspy-unfed, unwatered, wandering and wanting-my own voice tumbled out like a low roll of filthy marbles on asphalt, cat's eyes coming to a stop, "Don't, don't, don't don't _don't."_

"I'm afraid there's nothing more I can do," his words were raw, serrated blades shoved into my chest and turned to make the agony even worse.

The disbelief, _the rage_ mottled me into something that was anything but human. A pounding, crackling blue and violet violence lit from me like jags of lightning.

"No. _No no no no no NO!"_ My scream shattered the window, raised the bed up off its heavily-carved oaken legs, unsettling Edward, but I reached him too fast. So fast, I soared, caressing him back, covering his naked, lax form back up.

"No," I bit out, standing tall. My movements felt powerful, fueled by something inside me I'd never tangled with before.

"No."

Carlisle's handsome butterscotch eyes popped just like the windows and all the glass in the room had done.

"_No, no,_" this was worse than shock. This was the death of my heart, and aside from the Fury rampaging around like an electrical livewire inside me, keeping me upright and intact, I would have broken apart like delicate porcelain shards on the floor.

My numbness was overlaid by this rapacious will to kill for Edward, to make bleed, to feed him and fuck him and keep him safe from all others.

I rocked to Carlisle, reading his awe at this saturated appearance of me. Feral and fierce, I stalked, deep breaths inhaled, blazing hot exhalations rustling his clothes and causing an orange glowing inferno in the room.

Then I sank, and I rocked back and forth. Huddled on my heels with my arms restraining this untrained, unknown other who'd exploded outside of me, tears and tears and salt and sobs shook me. The lights dimmed to low, then extinguished, and a flare of candles caught and leapt, and Carlisle dared to lean close.

The _other_ in me snapped at him with bared teeth until he backed off.

I closed in like a flower going to sleep at night, all my untidy petals pulled around me as I cried out, "What do you mean? You saved him once, save him again!"

Carlisle halted at the door and came back, fell to his knees, took my keening, wrecked body to his, "He wouldn't want that, dear Isabella."

My cries ran harder with him saying my name, just as Edward did when we were alone. Just as his father had always spoken quietly, in love and lust, with Eliza.

Slamming back, I scrabbled away, my bare heels pushing up the Oriental rug like an accordion as I made away from him, "What do you mean?" I parroted myself. My spine met and dented the plaster at my back, bits of drywall from the ceiling above showered over me, making me white and ghostly.

"YOU SAVED HIM ONCE!" I was on my feet and heading for him again, checking once to make sure Edward was still in his pupae state.

Standing tall and true and straight and unyielding, Carlisle pulled in his fists and the veins in his neck beat with the cloudy blue that was of venom, not blood, and his head lowered as he looked up at me… _he was trying to hypnotize me._

"That won't work now," the other in me had hollowed me out. All that I breathed in was the sour sadness of losing my lover. Of watching my one fucking true love die before my very eyes, while I was _helpless_ to stop it.

"I'm HERE!" my bellow took out the last panes of glass, hanging like guillotines.

"He'd want to stay with me!" this new unutterable something _other_ made me ignite, but I held her as tight as I could.

My lungs filled. My lungs emptied.

I didn't lunge at my man's sire, his father.

I became a statue, a mortuary.

Cool and calm, Carlisle tried to talk me down, with the very fucking worst words ever spoken, "Furthermore," he stiffly relied on his physician's speech, "He's too far gone."

All my impotency turned into potency.

Thunder blew out of me, taking apart everything in the room that wasn't nailed down or attached to Edward's failing body.

"Bella," I dimly heard Carlisle's voice, it came to me on winds as if I was standing on the knife's edge of a cliff.

"Bella!" His claxon buckled my knees briefly but wasn't enough to stop this falling apart, this ripping asunder, like my skin, like my heart, like my life. "ISABELLA!"

I didn't respond.

_Death, death, death._

"ESME!" he roared, and the name came to me from under waves, as if sands had been piled up into my ears… _Esme?_ Esme would help. Esme loved Edward as a son, as her own offspring, as her best friend.

Esme would know how to make this horror show end.

_Yes,_ Esme. Surely she'd do something. She'd know.

_Esme._

Calming, I trembled off the last bits of the she-devil. I looked down at my arms… unused to the black coal dust that flecked like the tiniest compacted diamonds on my arms. It lay like glitter amongst my freckles. This charcoal was always under Edward's eyes now, no matter how many times I took a damp cloth to his face, gently washing, wanting him to look at me.

_It had come from me._

I faltered and had barely steadied myself against Edward when Esme walked inside, looking at the destruction, smelling the piney scent of… _her._

Little mounds of ash puffed from beneath her feet.

I wandered, tiredly, up her figure to her face.

Her face that held nothing but…

_Peace?_

How could she?

Betrayed, I jerked over Edward, covering him with my skin, my body tight and solacing and asking, begging, _pleading_ with him to come back to me.

I gave a dead final look at her, "He's your goddamn son, Esme! How can you stand there like that?"

_How can you accept this?_

_**~~A Dream~~**_

There had been something as slick and slippery as mud droning in my blood.

Thick and meaty and… _unstable?_

Ravens had cawed outside, raking their talons on the trees' barren limbs, scratching on icy bark.

The morning after the family had gathered in Edward's room, with his first jerking, blind convulsion, I'd kept my untiring vigil at his side. Constantly tucking in the blankets—thick, soft lumps pulled tight to his hips and wide shoulders—the mattress hadn't dipped at all as I'd climbed up next to him.

As I always had, long before I met him, years before I really _knew_ Edward, I kept to my duty. I couldn't have pulled away, I'd barely left to change into one of his t-shirts, the gloriously rich, smelling-of-him cloth calling up dry sobs from my chest. Every time he'd shifted, moaned, curled his brow in, _in pain_, the clawing, deep wound had opened inside of me.

Letting more of the unknown out of me.

Rubbing my forehead into his neck, I'd stretched up to glide my lips across the corner of his slack mouth. My hands ran over his chest, centering finally on the left side, the one he'd always claimed was dead. Thinking I possessed some kind of occultish magic that could keep him tethered to this earth, I'd rubbed and massaged his muscle. I didn't will for a life like mine, just for his immortality to continue.

In each corner of the room, over every surface, I'd lit candles. Esme had brought them to me; she'd known all about the guardianship I'd kept over my hazy, imagined thoughts of Edward before we'd met.

_A light on for him, always, _I'd confessed one evening to Esme.

Gray smoke whispered up and thickened against the ceiling like smog, and the wicks gathered like that coal-black dust that continually dropped down beneath Edward's lashes.

Through a stupid, weak sob, one that had me catching my breath, I'd watched each flame in turn—_probably a fire hazard. Not a good idea in a house full of combustible vampires._

It was my old constant, so I didn't give that thought any fucking heed. Charlie and Renee knew what was happening. They'd been alerted. During a brief and pitiful phone call, Charlie had assured me he'd lit the votives in our home, too.

People—_or vampires, rather_—had come and gone from this smoky purgatorial chamber.

I'd noted with dulled but scrutinous eyes what they were wearing, how fresh and clean they'd looked, how well put together while their brother and son lay out as if there was already a tombstone above his head.

Until I'd gotten to their eyes. And each of them had mirrored the tensed deadness in my own.

I'd flared and pounded and beaten around the walls, pacing and cursing and shouting—_really, I'd been a huge bitch, _"Get the FUCK OUT! Don't you look at Edward like that! Don't think he's lost! Don't act as if he's gone!" Wildly, I'd wave my hand over the beautiful, limp, pale body of my man behind me. My fingers turning into fists at my hips as I'd pound straight up to Rosalie, Jasper, Emmett and Alice, on the verge of slapping the identical mourning, sympathetic grimness from their faces.

The shockwaves thrown from me had them backing up. The violet light escaping me like a thunderstorm's brew had them hollowly replying, "Of course not, Bella."

But not one of them had said, "It's going to be okay. He's going to make it."

I did, I had, all the time, all that day. Until my voice was hoarse, and all I had was a laryngeal whisper to wield against the ashes mounding, congealing inside of him.

Carlisle had silently made to the other side of the bed, checking Edward's… _vitals?_ I choked on a laugh… _vitals, yeah, right._

"What are you listening to? His heartbeat? His pulse? Are you taking his… _blood pressure?"_ I'd gotten to my knees, hovering over Edward like a succubus sentinel, his t-shirt falling off my shoulders, folding up to bare my thighs.

Repositioning his stethoscope, Carlisle had looked me over with a scientist's investigation, then checked his watch.

"He's not… _well."_ Carlisle had rubbed his palms over his thighs, keeping those ingot eyes on his boy.

I'd lessened, fell to the bed and wrapped myself against Edward's side, "Tell me something I don't know," I'd feebly answered. Then the burbling bitch was back at it, and I'd raised as if on wings, as if those wings were beating in great _whooshes_ of my love, "What? How can that be?" My voice had craned like my neck, like I was a fierce bird of prey. "He's a _vampire_ for Chrissakes!" Even the flatline of my voice had been foreign as this tripping electricity inside me.

Exhausted, I'd crumpled, blinking up once, "Have I made him sick?"

He'd smoothed the back of his hand over Edward's clammy brow, pushing back the wilderness of his… _sweaty?... _hair. He laughed ruefully as the bronze shock fell back in place. Leaning low to his son's ear, he'd prayed:

_The LORD__ is __my shepherd; I shall not want._

_He maketh me to lie down in__ green pastures__: he leadeth me beside the still waters._

_He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake._

_Yea, though I walk through the__ valley of the shadow of death__, I will fear no evil: for thou __art __with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me._

_Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over._

_Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the __house of the LORD __for ever._

The snick of the door had been but an interruption to my own less heavenly prayers when Carlisle left.

I hadn't felt his hand on my back, pushing me closer to his son.

But I'd remembered it.

I'd snuggled to Edward until I was smothered between his legs, "So, it looks like I'm going to be the death of you."

His blank face and closed lids with those diamante bits of dark gray sands had been washed of emotion.

_What am I? What am I?_

"What the _HELL_ am I?" I'd pounded against him, and the only thing that shook was the mattress.

He hadn't even fucking flinched beneath my blows.

Useless as an old unable-to-get-it-up asshole, I'd been—_I was_—powerless.

Wrapping Edward in yarns and yarns of fabric, blankets and my lightest cotton candy spun stories, I'd spent the next night talking, talking, _telling_. Tales of truth and those of fantasy, of my hopes and how much I needed him. Legends that existed in my bones that I'd never really known until they flooded out of my lips. Whimsies and whispers and love and… all the while blocking away the one lethal idea… _is this the end?_

Unable to cry anymore, at least not for another hour, I'd decided to bathe him.

I couldn't stand the glimmering jet powder that settled like dunes beneath his eyes that never opened.

Juggling a basin in my hands and towels under my hands, I'd uncovered Edward. His gorgeousness was a beauty that stunned me.

I hadn't wanted to focus on his penis, but even in sleep, he was large and wide and mouthwatering.

My fingers wrung out the cloth, and I washed him. Not ten seconds in, I let the cloth fall to use my bare hands, sudsing up and down his body, lathering his smooth, hard planes and every ripple of sinew. I'd parted his legs and patted his sac and swirled up his ass and in between.

On reflex, he'd grunted and rolled his hips with my touch,

His erection formed, a deep red ribbed with veins reaching up higher, a pearl of cum sitting on the slit of his head.

_Well, at least his cock still responded to my touch._

I stroked outwards from his stomach, up his muscled ribs and held my hands, clasped, above his heartwork again.

_Just if, just once… just a beat._

A huge inward gasp had him arching off the bed, his arms thrown out in crucifixion form.

Eyes that were turbulent and a mish mash of weird colors had opened to mine.

Lucid.

Gasping, Edward had grabbed my hands and cupped them to his mouth, a Holy Grail he drank from.

Falling back, he'd shaken loose the clasp at his neck, he'd shoved off his signet ring.

He'd kissed them both—that pear shaped and colored diamond of his mother's, the Masen family crest from his father—and worried them into my palm until the gemstones had started to cut my skin.

I wouldn't close my hand.

"I will _not_ accept this," I'd strained to keep my hand open, to give his final wishes back.

Unswayed, Edward had pushed out the fourth finger of my left hand and slid his mother's wedding ring onto me.

Crying, I'd bended my arms around his waist, twining us, "Don't, don't, _don't!"_

"Have these," his voice was so low and rocky, "Have me with you always."

Streams rained down on us both from my eyes, running into the funnel of his lips.

He'd kissed me lazily and took hold of my hips and talked and talked into delirium, always making sure the two rings were on me. Eliza's now on my finger, Edward John's on that long polished chain about my neck.

The two trading places.

As he'd drifted away again, _I'd prayed_, "_Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, please."_

_**~~Sleeping~~**_

A benevolent light had warmed me.

It was the sun.

Another day.

The second day.

I'd punched my stomach to stop the hungry growl coming from it—_stupid fucker! Didn't my body understand I had better things to do than feed and water and be a goddamn human being right now?_

Wafts of breakfast foods had entered the room.

Faint from all the fright, the hunger too, I'd stood and cracked the door.

Jasper had been right outside, lounging against the opposite wall, his lower lip pulled down and tucking in, "Go and eat, Bella." He'd looked around me and bracketed himself to the chair rail for a second before shoring himself, "I'll stay with him."

I'd had no words left.

_He won't die, he won't die, he cannot die!_

Jasper had nodded.

A sadness built up on ignorant bravery was voiced between us.

I'd felt my way down the stairs.

Every step had been a cracking apart.

A tearing asunder.

I wanted to run back up and shove Jasper out and lock the door, with me inside.

My knees had buckled from the scents of cooking.

This part of my being took me to the kitchen.

Emmett had been leaning over the table, his big body making child's play of the chair groaning under his weight.

Blinking, he'd looked up, and then back to the flapjacks with blueberry syrup soaking them to indigo, "Just don't, you know, do that scary purple thing down here, okay?"

I'd agreed and sat across him. He spun the plate like a top to me, watching me devour the flapjacks, swiveling a mug of black coffee between his monolithic hands. Looking sheepish, he'd implied, "Just a human remembrance, you know?"

"Yeah," I'd breathed. Shaking off the concrete that had concentratedly taken up residence inside me, I'd watched Alice at the counter, washing dishes with her slight shoulder blades lifting and lowering like wings.

Onto me, she'd turned and dried off on a towel, whipping it to a bar, joining Emmett across from me.

A clatter from my fork to my plate, I'd jumped up and brought her hands to my face, "What's this?"

There'd been no struggle; Alice took her hands away and sat on them.

_Vampire bitch._

"I recognize that," I'd hissed.

Alice and Emmett had silently fought, and I'd lost my patience, pulling from deep and dark and awakened within myself, "_SHOW ME."_

On the table, Alice's hands were covered in hennaed tattoos.

A boat, hung with oak leaves.

The inscription of Saint Sarah.

It ran down the length of her arm.

I knew this, _I know this._

My pointer finger traced the indelible artwork, over veins that no longer beat, while Alice held her breath.

"_Sara e Kali." _Romany saint. The servant of the three Marys who'd first witnessed Jesus' rising.

"Sarah the Black."

_Of Edward's people._

"You call to his people."

Alice was beneficent.

"I show honor to his Saint." She bowed her head in obeisance even more, and I followed suit.

She who took the chosen in, guided them home to _Oppidum-Râ, Les__ Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer__._

Kissing her hands, I'd held them to my chest.

A blessing had worked inside of me.

And then a ghost beyond me.

Rosalie had slunk past, stopping at the door's jamb.

A fellow mourner.

No longer a creature, nothing more than a motherless being herself, her fingers had grabbed into wood and splintered as she'd sat down on the floor outside.

She'd keep her grief to herself.

_You have too much._

Her thoughts flurried to me.

But her silent screams repeated themselves of children dead and never to be had. Of mates lost. Of families separated.

Crackling energy crisped from Rosalie, even while she became a quiet Demeter outside.

_**~~Sleep Talking~~**_

When I'd returned to Edward's bedroom, Esme was there. Watching and rocking. _Guarding._

"Pay no mind to me," she'd hushed.

I'd wandered, feeling the pelt of Edward's hair, smiling when he'd turned on his side at my voice, "How do you do this?"

"You know, he's my first friend." Of them all, only Esme had spoken of Edward in the present.

As if the march of death was not raising its crimson flags all over him.

"Really?" I'd hugged against Edward. His mouth parted in a smile, _he was listening. _

"Oh yes!" Esme had jumped up, excitedly, coming closer. "He conspired to get me to seduce Carlisle."

She'd looked so young, alive and vibrant.

"Really?" I'd echoed myself.

"So young, so untouched and alone, but _passionate,_" Esme spoke. "Edward is _always_ passionate."

I'd given her a glower, and she'd shrugged it off, "Not towards me, _towards life, _about his people."

"He used to take me dancing, _oh those rumrunning days back in the thirties,_ just to get Carlisle's goat," Esme had gloated.

"Did it work?"

"You've seen me and Carlisle now, haven't you?"

_Funny, I'd never pictured Edward as a matchmaker… so much I didn't know._

"You mustn't be too hard on Carlisle," she'd advised.

Biting my harsh reply in two, I'd merely shirked quietly away from the light conviviality we'd shared.

"He's never been good with people outwardly, he worries that you humans will despise him for what he is, _what he's done,_" Esme had carried on. It might have been my tiredness, but her eyes had transmuted from gold to the prettiest blue for a moment, "But he's always been good to us. I'd never ask to be given back my mortal death… _never._ When Annaliese died, I wanted to follow her, _find her._ The only good thing from my marriage to Charles. Instead, Annaliese and Edward led me to Carlisle."

"I know," I'd bobbed my head, feeling ashamed for my lashing out.

"Oh, don't worry about him… he's a sensitive man, but he's also half-hard-headed," she'd laughed, rubbed across the top of her left breast, landing her palm to her heart and closing her eyes on the transparent glow, "He _is _a Pied Piper. And we're devoted to him, not from magic, not because we are indebted, but from the safety, the love, the security he offers."

"Between you and me, he's not half bad in the sack, either," Esme had laughed loudly, and I'd coughed over her confession because… _Holy Hell!_ _Too much information, Mrs. Cullen!_

Somnolence then painted. Then pained. Our smiles had worked down to tightness.

"He was going to kill himself." Esme'd closed her book, no longer pretending to read. "When he couldn't find you, he wanted to die."

"I know that feeling, sweet Bella," she had scooted closer silently, until her arms ranged around me.

"Looks like I did that for him," I'd begged his body to respond to mine, but all I'd gained was another taut seizure.

When the furiousness of his bones had stopped grinding against one another, I'd been surprised to find Esme hugging me around my waist still. Her pink lips were those of a mother, wanting to know for once and all, "What about you, Bella? Has there ever been another?"

I'd landed straight across Edward's reposed body, hanging onto him with all my might, "No!"

"_No. And there never will be."_

_**~~Sleep Walking~~**_

Dawn.

Day three.

"I'm not leaving him."

I'd known they were there before I'd even opened my hot, crusty eyelids.

_Charlie and Renee._

"Of course you're not, and we're not leaving you."

Their touches had reminded me of playgrounds and hopscotch and vacations.

Innocence and childhood.

Those intangible things Edward could hardly remember.

"Can't you tell me anything, Mommy?" I'd slid down to the floor, propped up against the bed, weary beyond belief and painstakingly avoiding sleep.

"Not really, dear, I was too busy growing my crop of pot to bother," she'd looked briefly at Charlie, "Sorry, hon."

His mustache had twitched up one side and he'd held his hands up, "Yeah, I'm on a 'don't need to know' basis with that, baby."

Renee rolled her eyes and came forward on her hands and knees, draping her arm around me, pulling me in tight, humming _Rhiannon._ Against my will, I'd been drifting off to sleep, but I'd snapped back and away like a rubber band, "Nothing? You've got nothing for me?"

Calming me, her hands had soothed down my arms to my hands, lifting them in the flicker-light of the tapers, turning them over and back. "Whatever it is was between you and Lieselotte; she's the one who bound you to Edward."

So exhausted my head had dropped down as she'd held up my weight with her maternal hug, I'd exhaled, "But what the fuck am I?"

Charlie'd coughed at my curse, but Renee had taken no notice, "Well, simply put-and if you believe in that kind of thing—you'd be known as The Chosen."

So close to sleep, I'd huddled down into her lap, even as the frisson of fear flicked and bit inside me, "Chosen to do what? Kill the man I love?"

"You can't kill what's already dead."

"Come, let's clean you up," she'd gathered me in her arms and limped me to the bathroom.

"But…?" I'd looked back to Edward's unmoving form, not wanting to leave him.

"I'm watching him, baby," my dad had taken his newspaper and settled down on the side of the bed.

Undressing me, Renee had filled the tub.

She'd helped me get in, happy as the water overflowed with citrusy bubbles.

I'd leaned forward into her arms, and she'd scrubbed my back. I'd rested in her hands, and she'd washed my hair.

Wrapped in a luxurious towel, I'd lowered to the vanity while she'd dried my hair, pulled one of Edward's clean shirts over me, then took me to his bed.

"Do you want us to leave you?"

_No. I needed them here._

She'd covered me up and rearranged Edward's quilts, tucking us in tight as a pair of butterflies in a cocoon.

_Metamorphosis._

Morpheus had come.

A deep, unthinking, desperately-dulled sleep.

Breaking through the shrouding fog of no-dreams, there'd been gallops of pounding accusations from within me: _Witch, Fairy, Chosen, Vampire, Death._

Death.

Close on the hooves of a cataclysmic understanding, I'd been shaken completely awake by a thoroughly bone-clanking shudder that almost toppled me to the floor.

Edward had risen.

His body was a bow, his torso pointed at the ceiling, his writhing thighs mangling the sheets, the soles of his feet planted to the mattress, his toes curling in and under and his mouth open in a silent howl.

"Oh God!" I'd lifted my hand to his chest, trying to press him back down but it was like rigor mortis had already fused his skeleton.

Against the scary thin grin of his lips, I'd placed my wrist, pumping the arteries at my elbow, feeling my veins fill with blood. "Take me, _have me now!"_

Knowing Edward couldn't turn me, this visceral reaction was just… _I just_…

I thought the blood he'd craved might reinvigorate him.

His teeth had bared and his nostrils blared.

_He felt this, he smelled me, he recognized my scent_.

I was reaching back for the ornate letter opener on his bedside table when a cold vise had halted me.

My head had swiveled back… _Carlisle._

"Don't." his fingers and his voice both stern and disproving.

"Why not?" I'd fought from his fisticuff hand with more ease than should have been possible.

We'd both looked down at my freed wrist with the same astonishment, Carlisle's clasp opened.

The rage inside of me had aim, and its focus was Carlisle's superbly unlined cheek. I'd wound up and smacked him and… _he'd fallen to his ass._

Disengaged, I'd leapt to my feet above him, "Why not? Why NOT I asked!" Shrill and cold, my voice had been unrecognizable. "He needs this, he _wants _this, he _knows_ this. Would you let him starve?"

When my screaming stopped, there was just this man on the floor gazing at me with that introspective query in his eyes.

Then he'd backhanded his mouth and pounced to the balls of his feet, leaning into me until our noses almost touched, "The reason Edward would never be able to change you, the reason you're immune to his venom, _the reason all this has happened, _is because you are…" he'd stopped and looked at the empty chairs across the room where my mother and father had so recently sat and seemed to think twice.

_And twice was too long._

Moaning, I'd hauled back again, _hell, this time I'd really do some damage_!

But my arm had been cranked painfully up my back between my shoulder blades, "Bella, _Bella._ You must stop this now."

"Why? The reason… _why?_" My teeth were grinding.

"You are poison to him." He'd released me, and I'd flopped down.

_Poison?_

Of course, of course.

_Yes, of course. My blood would kill him._

The irony, the sheer horror of it all.

_Who the fuck would ever dream this shit up?_

It was all too cruel.

To make me his _cantante_. To have him walk through the ages to find me, always searching for me. To make Edward want to kill the one he loves… _to kill me for my blood._ And to fashion my blood in such a devilish way it was lethal to him.

_Why, why, why?_

I'd dragged my sad eyes up, only to see Carlisle's tripping from bright gold to a damp tarnish. "Am I a witch?"

He'd solemnly nodded once.

"_Wherever gypsies go, there the witches are, we know,"_ I'd grasped this from Edward's faintly remembered stories.

All along, I'd been governed by a force beyond… _this life._

That itch was back, the one that wanted to protect and mate and recreate life and hurt anyone who got in Edward's and my path.

Everything I'd felt, everything that had happened… it all coalesced with such clarity I'd been flummoxed.

Unsteady, I'd sat down and just eyed Carlisle.

He'd worked over Edward, always with the gentlest touches, always with a father's hand.

When he'd finished, he'd walked to the door.

"Yes, yes," he'd spoken to himself in conversation.

Turning back, he'd knelt quickly below me, "Forgive me. I forgot. _You're the curse to his vampire being… you are the cure to his humanity._"

_**~~Awakening~~**_

Here and now, I plateaued. Noon, on day three, and there was just the three of us: me, Carlisle-_who couldn't do anything—_and Esme.

_Esme was his mother and his best friend, his oldest confidant!_ But she looked fucking fine with all this shit going down around us.

"Did you tell her?" Esme harangued.

"Not yet, she-" Carlisle stammered.

Carlisle and Esme were having words and all I could think was... _what the fuck were they waiting for? Why didn't they just put me out of my misery? Carlisle had already told me there was nothing more he could do for Edward… in essence, that we were doomed._

Add to that the fact I was apparently a fucking witch, and I didn't know which way was up, and I was about ready to go ballistic as they had some sort of marital argument.

With a mighty huff and muttered grumbles about 'sending a man to do a woman's job', Esme smacked her husband on the arm, "Well, no wonder she's half-crazed."

_Was I? Was I only half-crazed, because I felt full of the fucking crazies by this point._ A full serving of total insanity was working within me.

Especially when I got a load of Esme's beatific face, her pulchritudinous expression. Too calm, she was too eerily calm, and this had to be another nightmare. _Half-crazed? I was the engineer of the Crazy Train, let's not fucking mince words._

I was fast bypassing hysteria and heading straight to lock-me-up-in-a-padded cell histrionics.

_Who did she think she was? Mother Fucking Theresa?_

Then, _and then_.

_Oh Fucking Christ_, then Edward was nothing but a warping form weaving up from the bed in great tunnels of the most colorful gray.

Red and blue, purples and greens and yellows collided in sparks until they contributed themselves to the smoggy haze rising from him.

All the colors mixed and melded, just like him.

Shedding himself in a helix.

And those drifts of charcoal that had continually snowed beneath his eyes were… _nothing on this blizzard._

Ashes, _ashes_ of him—it was him! I could smell Edward in this wild weather; cedar and wool and that musky-sex smell—became a tornado up to the ceiling where the whole of him was a dense storm raining back on us until we were covered in the fluffy sleet of, of, of, _of… Edward?_

"Oh Jesus, _oh no!"_ I pushed a pile away from my face and whispered, "Oh please, oh please, _please_ tell me I'm not doing this."

Stunned to silence, Esme and Carlisle waded closer.

"Fuck!" I was well beyond watching my language in front of Dr. and Mrs. Cullen.

"_FUCK!"_

I crawled onto the bed and… _oh good God… _Edward was there.

He was still here.

My tears saturated him until he looked covered in blackest mud for a blanket.

My fingers traced deliriously through the silt, searching for that glimmering diamond skin of his, needing to see it gleam in the candlelight. But as I bit through the dust over him, my hands halted.

My heart… _stopped._

He was hotter than me.

_Edward was hot as Hades._

"Fuck, FUCK!" I wiped my hands down my face, "He's burning up!"

Esme stepped closer, peering through the smog, "No, he's not."

"The hell he isn't!" I was cracking up; my fingertips boiled from where I'd touched him.

Carlisle came forward, intervening between Esme and me, "I can handle this."

Esme looked doubtful, "Are you sure? Because -"

Carlisle interrupted, "Yes, love. Thank you for your advice."

"Well, sometimes you simply forget how to deal with humans."

_Helloooo! Ashes, raining in reverse, from Edward's body to the ceiling! Witch! Dying vampire son and my lover… FOCUS PEOPLE!_

I started hammering at his ribs, an instinct I couldn't deny.

Not until my hands were wired to my sides, and a svelte voice swarmed over me, "You don't want to do that, Bella."

"What?" I railed and arched, but Carlisle had obviously taken the measure of my strength and understood how to handle me now.

"You'll damage him," the calm in his voice incited me.

"Like hell I will!" I struggled and ended up with my face planted right next to Edward's.

Groaning and grappling, "He's undead. _He has to live!_ He's too hot, Carlisle… _please please please do something for him."_

"He's fine."

Wrenching away from Carlisle, I'd barricaded Edward with my body, "But-"

"98.6 precisely," came his smooth diagnosis.

I shook my head and lowered over Edward, his burning blooming like fired-up dry, driftwood to me, "No. He feels so hot, how can that be?"

Moving around, Carlisle smoothed his hands like a healer all over Edward. As I stared at him, unblinking, the ashes that had built up into gray banks melted to nothing before our eyes.

Not a single speck was left.

There was just a hushed _whoosh_ as the air sucked up the particles, leaving the chamber clean as before.

Every thing I'd broken, all the windows I'd shattered, all the glass was repaired with a quietly atomic _boom_ that dulled quickly, leaving ghost images behind of what had taken place in the past three days.

"Because, he's been stone cold for so long," Carlisle… _was he… he was smiling?_

No, _no_, surely not.

"And now?" I held my breath, heralded the last vestiges of my strength.

"Listen, _listen."_

_Listen._

_Thump-thud, thump-thud._

A surge rushed through me, causing goosebumps all over my body, making my hair stand on end and making my mind bend, "He's… _alive?_"

_Of course?_

_You can't kill what's already dead._

_You can end Endless Life._

_You can mend immortality… you can make mortal._

Carlisle looked, for a minute, too morbid.

So maybe this wasn't right.

"He's… _human_?"

"Yes, he is."

Too apprehensive, Carlisle worried me, and I begged, "Turn him back!"

Hesitating, Carlisle watched me and then looked beyond, "No. He wouldn't want that. Aside from you, this is the only thing he's _ever_ wanted."

As I crumbled, Carlisle held me, rubbing my shoulders, his words a rumbling heavy load of guilt, "I took it from him, Bella. I never asked. _I took his spirit._ You've returned his soul."

There was a spill of the sheets beside us, a canvas whitewashed and opening up with Edward rolling towards us.

And his face… _his face._

In this new repose… a smile curved. Bliss, _and peace._ His eyelids shuttered up and down rapidly. But when they opened, _oh when they opened,_ his irises were both green and gold.

And sleepy.

Weighty.

"_Isabella,_" he sighed.

And he breathed.

And his heart pumped.

And he was warm.

And he slept.

_Edward was sleeping._

And I cried… _I wept._

_**~~A Fairy Tale~~**_

I could no more hold them off than I could stop the happiness that broke like the most beautiful sunrise over me.

_Not even as a witch. I needed to bone up on those skills, clearly._

Filtering in as couples, two-by-two, to this ark that had been flooded, they came.

Everyone who mattered was stood around the room.

The drapes were opened.

The tapers hissed between licks of fingertips.

The sun provided our light, on this fourth day.

_Lazarus._

Champagne was opened; another human ritual not forgotten.

The cork held close in Carlisle's palm, the kaleidoscope of bubbling alcohol tipped into every glass, though only Renee and Charlie and I drank the dry, vintage fizz.

It tickled my nose, and I wanted to push them all away from Edward's drowsing body.

But I didn't.

_They deserved my thanks._

Emmett knocked against my shoulder, "So, you're a witch, huh?"

He looked a little bit worried, this wonderfully withheld mountainous man.

_I didn't know what to do with this knowledge yet._

He considered for a bit, watching the bubbles pop at the surface of his drink, "Cool, _I think._"

Keeping my eyes ever on Edward, I tried to relieve his brother, "Don't worry, I think it's only Edward I affect."

He knocked my glass and fell back, but then the smell of a physician folded inside of expensive cashmere came to me, "That's not true, you've affected all of us. What you've done to Edward…"

Hanging my head in shame, I made my way to Edward… _what I'd done to him._ I'd taken him away…

I heard a rustle and a hiss and fast words strobing past my ears and then Esme, "Don't mind Carlisle, dear." A glassy birdcage domed around me with Esme's arms hugging me, "What he meant was, 'What you've given us all.' What you've given of yourself and gifted to Edward. _It's remarkable, it's a blessing, Bella._"

There was a roughened voice.

One that was both new and old.

Edward was on his forearm, his bicep bulging, his chest thick with muscle and his face flushed.

And he was looking right at me, "Come here, _Isabella._"

Winded, wanting, I went to him, my hips shifting into a wanton sashay at the growling timbre he relayed.

A smirk appeared across his glossy, apple-red lips. His hips pivoted**.** He mentioned, "I'm tired now. Leave us."

_Holy what?_

They filed out, touching Edward, murmuring to me; now there was nothing but him and me.

As the door shut, he slid both his warm hands up from the indent of my waist, wandering over my breasts, landing at the sides of my throat.

A hungry lap of his tongue over his bottom lip and a spearing look from his jade-golden eyes and… _funny, he didn't look tired at all._

He pulled me on top of him and took off my shirt and feasted between my tits while I rode out the swell upon him.

"I missed you," I swayed and came as soon as his cock hit my cleft.

"I'll never go again." He didn't monitor my heartbeat as he sucked the most sensitive skin over my neck, deepening his caress of my lips until my legs parted, and my hips stormed to his thick, hard thrusts inside me.

Wetness and hugs and kisses.

_He would never have to worry about hurting me again._

What about me... _could I hurt him again?_

_Uuuuh!_

"Fuck, Edward, _fuck!_" I licked down his throat and watched his cock harden once more, that slight hook wandering up to my hold as I pulled and released and watched the dance of his hips.

"I could bathe you."

"_Mmmm."_

"I did it while you were unconscious."

His pelvis ground into me, "Did you?" came his guttural question.

He winked and another flume of wetness streamed from me, my knees were weak and my fingers slicing into his hair, my mouth swollen to his nipples and his arms, his ribs, his clenching tummy.

"So… _warm,_" I tasted his dick, and he split his legs wide.

"Bath?" his brows doubled, and his hands only just tore tiny new rips into the sheets.

_Damn, he made a fast recovery._

I was tossed on my back, and his gorgeous face burst with love… and devilishness, "I do feel _dirty_."

In the bathtub, under the waves, we jetted and his hands cupped my ass as he plunged up into me from behind.

His throat was a column of eroticism, his cock never more large or filling.

As his cum lifted to the surface, comingling with the bubbles I'd poured out, Edward stood with my legs wrapped about his waist.

Edward was a human, but hell if he wasn't as strong as before.

"Let me dry you," _yeah, as if his hands on me were going to make me anything but wet._

The rash of the terrycloth lifted my nipples. He slunk low to suck them to hard peaks of engorged pink.

He pushed my tits together and nudged his cock inside, throwing his head back with a blasting groan that radiated from inside me.

"Bed, now," he breathed.

I scrambled.

He advanced.

He whipped off his towel.

I looked.

I asked, "When was the last time you got yourself off?"

_Because, I really wanted to see that._

Even though his erection bobbed with my innuendo, Edward held himself up and away from me, his eyes pure bullion within craving, "You want to watch?"

_Oh yes!_

"You're a man now… _show me."_

As he strolled his hands up and down, he wielded his words and his cock, "The last time I masturbated was just before I was supposed to be sent off to," he groaned and coupled his linked fingers over that sexy shaft, lifting up drops of cum—nothing but vital, life-giving creaminess, "The War."

Edward racked his head back and gripped more tightly, dancing between his fists, "Mere months after I'd begun dreaming of you."

His hips were strapping, his cock gloriously fucking through his fingers.

I bent over him and made sure my mouth snuck over his head with every thrust he gave, and he planted his hands into my hair, working the wetness of my lips onto him.

"_Fuck me_, do it, Edward," I panted and gripped his thighs.

Bulging and dazed, he wound in and out of my mouth, up and down his twinned hands, beating the pillows aside and tipping forward, gasping until he jetted a thick, white icing inside of me.

So much, I had to pull back and lap his cum back into my lips.

I had to lick his hips and suckle under his balls.

As I nibbled and tickled,hel aughed hoarsely and hauled me up to his face.

His sex was wet and all over me.

I licked it off his fingers as he cleaned our skin with his hands, tasting and touching and combining us both.

Pressing me to him, Edward's abdomen rocked a few more times.

And then it rumbled.

He skated out a laugh, bringing me to him inside his broadly-muscled arms.

"What?"

"I think I feel… _tired._ And hungry?"

* * *

~Well then? Yes. I really think this was what Edward always wanted. So I had to give him that. I'd be ever so grateful to know what you think (of Bella the witch, of the way her blood could have killed, but rather saved Edward…or whatever's on your mind). Now, this isn't the end, there's a lot of 'Huh?' & 'Why?' & 'How the-?'…as well as, you know it…maybe a couple more twists and turns. One more chapter and the epilogue~

23rd Psalm, King James Authorized Version, 1611

Eddie and I were very lucky to win an award and a freakin' TON of honorable mentions from the Fandom People Awards! Thank you. There's a note on my profile, the full list on the Dead Confederates blog.

I recently posted a Southern slash two-shot, _Misguided Angel_. It's complete. I've written and will soon be posting the second and final chapter of _Jealousy_. Both of these stories now have the most sexy, intense, brilliant banners (on my profile).

_Cheers, Rie~_


	13. Life

Well, I ask a lot of my two beautiful betas (Vanessarae and Viola Cornuta) and they always deliver…my love to them!

Disclaimer: Really not mine.

~~Here we go…last chapter, epilogue to follow. Damn, it's been a brilliant run, thank you~~

Song:

_And the Boys, _Angus & Julia Stone

**www**** . youtube . com/watch?v=RUDc1frz22E**

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* * *

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**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Chapter Twelve: Life**

**Edward Anatolia Masen Cullen**

_There once was a Dormouse who lived in a bed  
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red),  
And all the day long he'd a wonderful view  
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)._

_A Doctor came hurrying round, and he said:  
"Tut-tut, I am sorry to find you in bed.  
Just say 'Ninety-nine' while I look at your chest...  
Don't you find that chrysanthemums answer the best?"_

_The Dormouse looked round at the view and replied  
(When he'd said "Ninety-nine") that he'd tried and he'd tried,  
And much the most answering things that he knew  
Were geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)._

_The Doctor__ stood frowning and shaking his head,  
And he took up his shiny silk hat as he said:  
"What the patient requires is a change," and he went  
To see some chrysanthemum people in Kent._

_The Dormouse lay there, and he gazed at the view  
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue),  
And he knew there was nothing he wanted instead  
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)._

_The Doctor came back and, to show what he meant,  
He had brought some chrysanthemum cuttings from Kent.  
"Now these," he remarked, "give a much better view  
Than geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)."_

_They took out their spades and they dug up the bed  
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red),  
And they planted chrysanthemums (yellow and white).  
"And now," said the Doctor, "we'll soon have you right."_

_The Dormouse looked out, and he said with a sigh:  
"I suppose all these people know better than I.  
It was silly, perhaps, but I did like the view  
Of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue)."_

_The Doctor came round and examined his chest,  
And ordered him Nourishment, Tonics, and Rest.  
"How very effective," he said, as he shook  
The thermometer, "all these chrysanthemums look!"_

_The Dormouse turned over to shut out the sight  
Of the endless chrysanthemums (yellow and white).  
"How lovely," he thought, "to be back in a bed  
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red.)"_

_The Doctor said, "Tut! It's another attack!"  
And ordered him Milk and Massage-of-the-back,  
And Freedom-from-worry and Drives-in-a-car,  
And murmured, "How sweet your chrysanthemums are!"_

_The Dormouse lay there with his paws to his eyes,  
And imagined himself such a pleasant surprise:  
"I'll pretend the chrysanthemums turn to a bed  
Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)!"_

_The Doctor next morning was rubbing his hands,  
And saying, "There's nobody quite understands  
These cases as I do! The cure has begun!  
How fresh the chrysanthemums look in the sun!"_

_The Dormouse lay happy, his eyes were so tight  
He could see no chrysanthemums, yellow or white.  
And all that he felt at the back of his head  
Were delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red)._

_And that is the reason (Aunt Emily said)  
If a Dormouse gets in a chrysanthemum bed,  
You will find (so Aunt Emily says) that he lies  
Fast asleep on his front with his paws to his eyes._

_~The __Dormouse__ and the Doctor, _by A. A. Milne

_**~~Too Hot~~**_

Too… _hot?_

Sweat rolled down my back.

My legs kicked off the covers that were stifling me.

Bella latched onto me harder. The glorious red peaks of her breasts pearled up. Not with cold but with their brush against my chest.

Jerking her closer, wanting this heat that didn't surpass my own, I remembered my last waking.

My heart had been too full, its yank chained against the walls of my sternum.

Pounding and pressing and pushing, that organ had felt inflamed.

_Bursting._

Like being licked by combustion again.

Hours, days, minutes had made me a man.

I'd fallen out of the bed and to my knees.

_I had… slept._

Slowly now, I woke. _ I woke._

Unused to this dimmed and clouded vision, I knuckled my eyes. I scratched at something itchy at my jaw… _stubble._ I hummed quietly, feeling the bristles pinprick my fingertips.

There was a stretch of woman beside me. A naked woman. _Isabella._ I inhaled and waited for the fireworks to start shooting up through the roof of my mouth and out the top of my head, down and out the soles of my feet.

There was only the pound of my erection.

_New._

Experimentally, I touched the softest underside of her forearm replete over me, wondering when her flesh didn't cave in to my caress.

"Awake, baby?" she hummed.

Her hand skimmed down my abdomen, below my dick, to cup my sac.

"Yessss," I pivoted up into her curled fist, my cock leaping and wanting her fingers to push against me higher.

Tight and wet and ready and half-asleep, Bella straddled me.

Biting down on my lip, I tossed my head back and my hips up until the head of cock was trapped inside her sweltering hold. Locked in, I gripped her waist, my hands caging her from front to back, and brought her down on me with a sneer to my mouth.

Cupping her ass, I raggedly brought her nipples to me so I could lick and suck and fondle them, "So luscious… your attributes…"

Up on her knees, her palms to my chest, her throat opened and her voice tight, Bella moaned, "What? My tits and ass?"

Even as she rode me, she made me blush. She liked to do that to me, catch me off guard, now that she could. The unfamiliar heat dredged into my capillaries, flourishing in my dermis.

"Yes," I clapped my hands to both her breasts and brought her down to me, with me, watching to the side as she ranged up and down my cock… suffusing me with dripping wet sex.

She stuck her fingers into my mouth, rolled back up and tugged at her tits with the saliva from me making her pointed red flesh glisten… for me, "Better than before?" Bella reared away, grabbed my thighs and arched herself so my cock drove endlessly into her.

_Yes, Yes!_ "Yes, Yes! _Yes!"_ I smacked the bed and braced her thighs apart to watch her sex sink over me until my shaft rutted, turned red as her hidden flesh, and my cock erupted within her, without her, inside… so much the streams coated both our thighs, and we sighed and rocked and slid together over and over again.

"I can," I inhaled jaggedly, "touch you now."

"Always did, Edward," came her drowsy assurance.

"Love you," I kissed her.

"_Mmmm, me too,_" Bella shuffled into me, again.

Waking, _washing my face with my hands, gathering myself up from the dreams of a night spent in slumber_, there was a crown on Bella's pillow. A daisy chain made of leggy delphiniums… blue hoods dripping their heads and ashing pollen to the white pillowcase, as my body had become charcoal coming down like a snowstorm. Like the clover tiaras I knew Esme had made as a young girl.

But this was from Bella.

I sat up and paid attention to all the sounds creaking throughout the house until I heard her titter of laughter coming to me in drifts.

In the kitchen.

And Emmett's twinned thrusts of gut-deep laughs.

I needed to be by her side.

_**~~Too Old~~**_

"Does that taste good?"

"_Mmmm-yef-hmmm,_" I muffled through a mouthful of banana split.

"If you say so, because it looks like someone took a loose turd on your ice cream," Emmett was leaning against the counter, eyeing me up and down before he bent in to sniff at the mounded bowl in front of me.

_Hot fudge._

Bella was making good headway with her own, smaller dessert. And laughing at Emmett.

He turned his back and dove into the refrigerator, tossing items aside, "What you want next, brother? I can do a turkey sandwich," he stopped to peel open a container with deli meat, "Think it's turkey, anyway." He came out, just as large as the icebox whose open door framed him, giving him a manufactured glow from behind like an anomalous sort of Gabriel, a bottle of wine in each hand, "Or you could get tanked!"

Oddly, Emmett was the most interested in my human hungers.

_Aside from Bella, of course_.

He'd taken on the role of personal chef. It was pleasing, and disquietingly weird.

Jostling an apple pie from the lower shelf, he smelled the crust and stuck a blunt fingertip through it, ran the juice of caramelized apples—_I knew these words now, I understood the taste of food on my tongue, as if I'd never died… it had all come back to me with a rush—_and shivered as if nauseated.

"A la mode?" Bella's hand snuck up my inner thigh, finding not only muscle but my cock as it began to harden with her little forays up and down my inseam.

I was voracious, and not simply for food.

Rosalie stood sentinel, as she always did. _Always had._ A watchful eye, one that had been ever-protective was now turned to the dark amber of wariness.

She never entered the room I was in.

But she watched.

She never conversed with me.

But she listened.

Stuck like a pale piece of linen to the door's carved entry, Rosalie hovered.

Ducking her head as I stood, she wouldn't meet my eyes. "Excuse us, Bella, Emmett."

I headed to the family room… _family room_. Now I understood all that ached inside of Rosalie. Pivoting quickly, I stopped just inside the doorway of the library, beckoning my sister, "Would you please join me, Rosalie?"

Unpeeling herself from the surroundings, she took form as a classically beautiful vampiress and followed me into the enclave scented with wood polish and antique tomes that held the shadows of all of us, at one time or another. I nodded my thanks and closed the door behind Rosalie.

"I'm sorry," we started at the same time, but she silenced me with her fingertips to my mouth; they were so utterly cold they sent chills through my veins, and I thought of how my touch must have frostbitten Bella. And how she'd taken me to her all those times, nonetheless.

Rosalie spoke with such speed I was racing after her words until I interrupted, "I can't hear you as well as before," pointing to my ear in explanation of my new auditory disability.

"Of course not," Rosalie sat down.

Her head was in her hands, and her gilded locks fell over her face, "I'm sorry about the way I feel. I _am_ relieved for you, Edward," she looked up at me, and all of her was a soft offering of sisterliness, "but I'd be a liar if I didn't admit how envious I am."

Crossing to her, I knelt to take her elegant hands in mine, rubbing them as if to kindle some warmth from my own skin. "I understand. _I only wanted Isabella all this time… _you wanted life again."

It was as if a giant sob sent waves through her body, and she relinquished her posture so her face hit my shoulder.

"I've gotten both," I smoothed down her hair.

I felt her agree against me.

"I hate this," she straightened and strained away.

Pointing to her chest, she circled that dusky hole we'd both known; the one only she was empty of now.

"I know."

"You can't blame a girl for believing in fairy tales," she smiled halfheartedly.

"No."

On her feet, Rosalie waited for me to stand before she wiped down her cheeks, as though tracks of tears had rained there, "Do me one favor."

"Anything."

"Don't squander this gift. You have _life_. You have your soul back, your heart…"

I couldn't help but grin and stand even taller.

Back to the second-in-command role, she bared her teeth, "Because I will always be watching. In case you mess up, Edward."

Chuckling quietly, I ushered Rosalie out, "I'm honored by your… _keen interest._"

Rosalie readied to give me one of her world famous noogies, but then remembered I was a bit more breakable than before, "Watch your mouth, Edward."

I tapped my heels together, "Whatever you say, ma'am."

We were laughing as we went back to the kitchen, where we found Bella demonstrating how to make the perfect sub sandwich.

A dome of silence thickened around us four.

The distance across the tiled floor was a quick meeting between Rosalie and Bella. They exchanged a look of acceptance, _gratitude._ Words were not needed as they hugged quietly.

_**Too Cold~~**_

"So, what was it like," she looked at me with her summer eyes, the shadows of her lashes creating hollows on the crests of her cheeks.

I gave a small smile, one that ate up the pain I'd felt those three days when I'd been scorched from the inside-out, once more. Shaking my head and blowing out a puff of air, I looked to the side, avoiding, "So, what's it like being a witch?"

Bella shrugged but grinned a little bit.

I pressed forward, following her as she turned in a small pirouette, "What was it like handing Carlisle his ass?" I knew that would make her laugh, me letting go my propriety.

Our words were circling, our actions radiating around one another, drawing in, stepping back. Conjoining circles touched outlines, frenetic energy banding us together and polarically pushing us apart.

Neither of us wanted to address the other's question.

Everything felt too raw and open and uninspected.

We'd effectively switched places; I the human, she the one with paranormal powers.

"You can still read minds though, right?" her remark was perfectly irreverent.

"Yes." I could still do that… but that had never been a vampire gift. The ability to hear thoughts was a birthright from my mother, a gift from our ancestry. An heirloom from the Anatolias. In a colorful flash, I saw the times we'd sat out in the cold winter of Chicago, watching pedestrians, lingering over their thoughts, me hiding my face from the ideas women imagined of me, Eliza holding forth that none of them were worthy and that I was not one bit aberrant.

"But not mine?"

"No," I agreed.

"_Phew_, that's a relief," Bella joked.

"_Isabella_," I reproached.

"And _you_ can still gather storms and make life from death, kick a vampire to the floor through thought alone?" I returned, ranging closer. I was warm, the air between us tangled like vines of passionflower blooming in the most odd color combinations… bright green to deep purple.

"Maybe. I haven't tried out any of my new tricks again," Bella tossed over her shoulder as I glanced the back of my hand down her hip, lightly over her bottom.

I slid my palm halfway up her inner thigh, feeling the thrum of her veins slapping against skin, in time to mine, "Perhaps you should," I licked the very soft point of her earlobe.

Bella's neck tracked to my touch, following it like a flower opening to warmth.

"You want me to fuck you like that?" her voice low and rough.

Her words had me frowning blackly, biting down on my lip, emitting a groan that was all man.

Spinning, she pushed me away, "You tell me what I did to you."

Walking around her again, I lingered at her pulse points feeling nothing more than the impulse to push my lips and teeth there, but not to feed… simply to suck and kiss.

"Why?" I was hoarse, could hardly catch air.

"I need to know if I hurt you," she was suddenly soft, slanting back to the sofa in my room.

"No, you don't." Adamant.

Grabbing at my belt loops, she yanked hard, "_Yes_, I do."

I was on my knees, my face raised to her, something earthbound guided by the sun's rays.

But my eyelids shut her out as I recited coldly, "Three days of bodily torture, Bella." I sucked in, blew out, didn't watch. "The reverse of becoming a vampire _really_… where before my bones and tissue and marrow and mind mingled devilishly with flames crisping my very core, this time... a backdraft, if you will. A scorching of my skeleton, sucked back out of me."

"So the ashes-"

"Some from your nature… you are of the woodlands. A maiden of the forest, yeah," I watched the swathe of her deep brown hair and darker eyes, the fine frame of her body, petitely curving… bows to wind. I turned back the window, "Most was from my innards combusting. The residue of my previous incarnation."

I stood and walked and wandered to the window pane, seeing the flush of life reflected back at me. Absentmindedly, I said, "I need a shave." Scrubbing the pointillist spread on my jaw, listening to it rasp against my fingers, I asked, "Is that what you wanted to know?"

She was stilled, paralyzed like I'd been, "Yes, it's what I wanted to know, and _no_, it's not what I wanted to hear. Edward, I never meant to do you harm, I only ever-"

I ran to her, holding her, rocking slowly, speaking, so softly, "I know…but you knew what I wanted. And you gave it to me. _That is done, _it's done, and we're here."

Hiccuping, Bella ran her hands down my face, tracing every living feature, awed by what she'd begotten.

"Now you tell me, how does it _feel_ to be powerful?" I ruthlessly pulled her shirt away over her head.

She inhaled, "You know already, Edward."

"Not anymore, _no._"

"Oh really?" Bella tucked her fingers just under the waist of my jeans and touched the swollen head of my cock.

I halted her wrist, drew her to me, "Why are you like this?"

"For you, Edward… _for you_," Bella's opened legs fell around my torso.

"I was chosen, for you." She pushed me back and memorized my muscles, my shoulders, my arms, my chest, with her fingertips. "_Chosen, I think… to put the end to our families' dispute. _Your curse was my curse, and it was that you should be so beholden, so beguiled by my blood you would take my vein and die from its poison made just for you. Because they made sure, my people, that I would be the death of you."

"Or the life." I wondered, easing slightly away.

"Or the life of you," awe dawned over her face. "They didn't figure for love. They hadn't realized there would be a balance, there _had to be_ a balance. Hate to love, or love to hate. You cannot tip the scales in one direction without equalizing the other side. _They had no idea the curse between us would become a charm!_"

"Lieselotte." I murmured.

"Yes, _meine grosse-grossmutter_. I think she understood.

"And Eliza."

I brought my head up at the mention of my mother. _She had known, she had done this all for a reason. 'She will save you, she will save you again',_ those were her words to Carlisle as she'd let go of life, let me go onto another being.

Abruptly, the tension between us, that magnetic hand-over-hand, that tug of war shifted. Turned sexual, sultry, steamy.

I stood and my ready erection showed large and rigid beneath my pants.

"I need to shave," I repeated.

"Maybe you shouldn't, I want to feel those silky whiskers… between my thighs," Bella tried to meet my height but was still a foot short.

Wrapping my hands around her waist, I brought her to me, rocked my cock into her, "So, you're a witch," I repeated… the same words Emmett had used while I'd been waking, blearily watching, listening and coming back.

_Now I was back._

She switched aside, "Not really. I don't know any potions or incantations or shit like that."

I pursed my lips so as not to laugh, "And I'm the human?"

"Yeah," a tiny vestigial glow came off Bella in a saffron haze. "So, if I wrinkle my nose, will you do what I want?"

"What do you want?" I turned her back to me, whispered as close to her lips as I could without touching. My voice, a bed of velvet, my body, hard as before, but no longer were there nettles on my tongue. I didn't have to think twice or hold back.

"You. Naked. Now."

In an instant, I was shoved so deeply down her throat I would have feared for her before.

_Not now._

Bella swallowed and licked back up, sliding her palms behind my thighs and grabbing onto my ass, watching my dick dance before her mouth.

We were on the floor, the bed a mess of blankets ripped aside and hanging off.

Her neck was at a beautiful angle as I captured her hair, bound her to my erection, crying out with every thrust, so hard and full my balls were bound up against my body, "Want to cum on you…"

Her legs spread further out, and her cheeks hollowed in a good, long suck ending with my tip twirled around and around by her tongue.

Sweat and heat and sex and wet and smells and yells were the only catechisms here.

As I threw back and lunged forward and started unleashing ropes of seed inside her mouth, Bella let me go with a panting wash down to my balls. She tongued all over me then sat back, "On me, now."

I punched against my tip and saw it turn to red and unfold its new waterfall all over her breasts. Bella held them up, framed them with her hands, let my semen sink down her cleavage to her belly and lower, to her cunt. She eyed me as she bathed my cock with her tongue. Lower, I pushed her fingers aside and swam my knuckles up and down her slit, curling my bones into her, unfolding up inside and touching, tapping the rough spot that made her arch back and scream, "_Yesss!."_

Palm to clit, fingers deep inside her channel, heated rivers of lust rocking between us like her hips riding my hand, Bella came.

With my seed on her tits and her lips and dribbling off her chin, her face flushed.

Putting her to bed, I took up the covers and wrangled her to me, "I love you, Isabella."

What came from her was a shuffle of words, "_So good, more… tired… yes._"

My laughter jolted her closer.

I… _yawned._

_We fell asleep._

It was more of the same… but everything was so very fucking different.

I wasn't even aware of it. After one hundred years of wakefulness… _I slipped away._

_There was a death, my death._

_The arms that held me were of my own strength, but not strong enough._

_Carlisle was there, Esme, my family. Watching. Their faces had changed from crisp good looks to somber, saddened masks._

_Two graves were lowered down to ground._

_Wood bound me._

_Suffocating mortuary._

_The lights went out. The air let out. My lungs collapsed on themselves. I clawed and scratched and just wanted… 'I'm alive!' I barked, but the six feet of dirt, the lugging clumps thrown down from shovels by people who didn't really give a shit about ceremony… the earth deafened my voice from those above._

_I roped my need, I would do this, I would not let her die alone, apart, away._

_I broke through, my knuckles bleeding and rusty, and the iron smell so familiar like a Sunday dinner and then more dirt and worms and slithery centipedes and everything impeded me._

_Another casket._

_I punched and kicked and wiped the dirt away and the mud and too-many-feet of death and lifted her to me, over me._

_Bottled up, Bella was dressed in one of her pretty summer dresses._

_Breath had left us both._

_On top, up there, in the world, neverending… they continued._

_Carlisle and Esme, Alice and Jasper, Emmett and Rosalie._

_Even Renee._

_Charlie was down here with us somewhere._ _One hundred years and half the United States apart… my father and my mother were interred as well._

_We would die, we would die, I couldn't stop it, I couldn't… Bella was going to die._

_And I would follow right after her._

_And our family would be left._

I bolted up with a torrential bellow bursting from me!

Blinded for sight but for the death I'd seen, I reached over, grappled with the woman next to me, felt against her chest and listened to her heart and hovered over her mouth.

_Breathe in, breathe out._

_Beat-pump-slide-beat-pump._

"We're going to die," I whispered.

I must have yelled, instead, because Bella pumped up, completely alert, saw my countenance and hurried off the bed.

She dressed quickly.

"Carlisle?" In the hallway, she looked left and right and up and down and the worry on her features gave me pause as I ran a novel ring round my room, keeping tight to my bed where our smells lingered headily.

Her words ran like chimes about the top floor of the house, coming back at us.

"Carlisle!"

I watched like a separate being, still stuck underground.

Eating food was**…**_satisfying__**.**_

Making love to Isabella, strongly, with virility, without hurting her was… _amazing._

But, _we would now die._

Anything could happen to her.

And I was helpless to stop it.

This was no fairy tale.

She's taken my immortality. Given me existence.

I'd age and die and…

_Now I could never save Bella._

"CARLISLE!" Bella turned on all the lights through fantastical force alone while I tore about the passageway in front of her, thinking, saying, "_I have to go, I have to go._"

I smiled thinly on hearing Carlisle's approach through his thoughts, "I did think we were over this drama."

Carlisle wore the robe Esme had given him, in 1922.

Just as good as new.

_Like me?_

Bella hauled him down to the study and poured a sturdy, strong drink for us both.

I sniffed at the strange caramel brew, then drank the burning liquid.

My chest flamed and I coughed.

She gave me another.

_As if I could be deadened by alcohol._

"Are there more like me and Edward paired?"

"I don't know, Bella."

I narrowed my vision, the better to focus with these feeble eyes.

"Why?"

"Why not?"

I pounded between the two, Carlisle was too close to my… _to Bella_, "How?"

"Poison can also be the cure," Carlisle glared me away until my knees buckled and I sat.

I tore at a loose hangnail and then jumped up a couple seconds later, "_Wrong!_ This is wrong.

"I need to leave, I need you to live," I commanded of Isabella.

That thick juicy organ inside my chest split like my mind, a swirling nonsense battling in me.

"Did you want to be human, Edward?" Carlisle asked as a storm rustled right around Bella in arsenic green.

"Yes, but-"

"How long did it take you to come to terms with being a vampire? And you want to chuck this in, three days a man?"

"I cannot," I traced the room, took in all the ways anyone could get in, and knew the windows were locked down with their hasps in place. Still functioning at a fast rate, my mind was able to reach out through the entire household, checking each point of entry to make sure it was secure. But it wasn't enough, would never be enough. "_I cannot watch her die._"

Ignoring me, he spoke to Bella, "You understand what transpired?"

"Kind of. But you mentioned my blood. He was never near my blood," Bella was trying to get to the… _heart of the matter._ She was calm as could be, not looking at me; the rangy animal imprisoned between then and now.

"Yes, well, that is curious but not without scientific precedence," Carlisle pontificated, I fell further into my own little voided black hole.

"More to the point, your body's excretions worked into and against Edward's immortality."

_Her secretions?_

He was fascinated by the chemistry, our biology.

_But I could not keep her safe!_

"Your touch," he cleared his throat and straightened his tie, "your _bodily fluids_ were the antigen.

"The absorption of your… for lack of a better word, _pheromones_, adapted Edward."

This was so grossly inadequate to what I felt. My rapture leaked speedily out like water through a sieve, _drip-drop. Maybe_ it made a soft pound-thump like my new heart.

"I'm leaving," I decided.

"No, you are not," Bella demanded.

"Watch me," I broke out all my heart and pitted it to the floor at her feet.

I shoved through the fortress of the room, blowing against the walls with my feet kicking, my fists wheeling.

The fury in my fragile purple veins finally unleashed to physical destruction.

_I had that black and gold still inside me, dormant but waiting, amongst my green and amber eyes._

With my formidable outburst, the spines of Classics clattered to the varnished floor. Medical volumes blew up and took flight, their leather covers wings and the svelte pages feathers.

I was not as exposed as those old pages… yellowed leaves.

_Not as vulnerable._

_I want this._

I watched Bella's mouth go from stern to approving as she took in my capable destruction, the heavy old bookshelves teetering before collapsing like kindling with a thick, loud crackling rush to the floor.

_I want her._

Carlisle toed over the remains of his library, "Well, that was more than just your typical teenage temper tantrum. I think it's safe to say you've retained some of your physical attributes, Edward." Then he hit me with a disapproving glower, "I fully expect you to have this all cleaned up, rebuilt and back to rights by the morning."

"Yes sir," I nodded, feeling abashed but more…_smug_ with what I'd wrought.

I tucked her hands into mine, our fingers like chains fenced together, _"Above all, I need you to be safe."_

"And I am," Bella looked about at what my inured rage had caused.

I'd always wanted to guard her… _from myself._

The full weight of futility again hit my breathing chest, my chest that would collapse from a hard blow, even a simple tap from Emmett… my heart that could stop and I could die…

_A pot of geraniums brought in from the garden, a whisper of expensively tailored worsted wool. Spices both luxuriant and untouchable, unreachable and fragrant… exotic. _I could smell them now, Eliza, and Edward John. My mother, my father… Bella, the elixir.

Just like them, I would cease forever.

A mourning weight like dumbbells to my throat made me gasp.

I stood firm and hard and looked at my grief and stowed it away.

That mattered naught. What was beginning to eat away at me with spreading anxiety was the idea _anything_ could happen to Isabella. Before, I could have stopped cars from colliding with her, I could have maimed, torn, shredded, dissected with nothing more than the littlest curl of my fingers, a flick of my teeth… _now I was useless, incapable. _

Crazed, I wanted to go out and buy guns, an entire arsenal of weapons simply to have on hand should the need arise. Should I have to kill for my woman because my body-though demonstrably stronger than the average male's-would never be the machine of death it had previously been .

Kicking through the piles of books, I was that caged beast I'd been so long ago, in Carlisle's study, in Chicago, "I have to go," I reiterated.

A _voom_ sounded, washed over us and sank in colorless, weightless waves around us.

_Bella._

"Wait! What?" With regal intensity her need for me joined with my dramatic excitation.

That push and pull, that opposable, unquantifiable viability became visual, feeding between us in arcs of energy that lifted me from my enervation and fitted me right against her luscious body.

She was aroused, angry.

I was annoyed, disgusted with myself… _furious. _

Clouds billowed out below our feet in a foggy mist that slid up damply around us, completing the combination of our hearts and bodies and abilities.

At the brewing typhoon lashed around us two with skeins of lightning-white bolts between our fingertips and the heavy air a swirl of saturated scattered weather, Carlisle excused himself and shut us in.

_This was what I wanted… Bella knew it in her bones. Bones that would ever be breakable, like mine now. _

She raised her arm, her hand aimed at my cheek, but I gripped her wrist and took it up to the pulpy _pump-pump_ in my chest, "I… _I."_

Bella stopped and stooped and relaxed. Cunning woman, she wiled her way from me by making me think her weaker than me.

Stamping back, pounding to, she rose off her feet in a display that lit all the candles in the room and threw open the windows until they slapped with wood to wood and glass that shook like my muscles.

"If you love me, you will stay."

In a puff of fabric and ivory limbs and light and love, she came down to the floor, then further to her knees; and she should ever be there like that before me.

Weaving away from my clutch, she gave out in a dusty voice, "Why do you have to be _so_ dramatic, Edward?"

"Said the sorceress to the reformed vampire."

Straddled against me, she laughed shortly, "But you don't have to save me now."

I clung to her hips, tugged on her earlobe and slid my mouth down to her shoulder, "Not helping. I'm a man, I'm your _mate_ and that's my job."

"You arrogant fuck." Bella shattered back off of me, stood in a rainbow of violet; lilac, lavender… _lovely… _pissed off.

In response I joined her, parting the ionic curtain of colors raining over her, _roaring, _"It's NOT LIKE THAT! The very cloth, the threads of my fiber, _the thing that has kept me together all these decades… it's YOU!_

"I _must_ take care of you."

"You can't do that if you leave. So that's just not an option." Then she was caressing me, gentling me. "You will stay." Her fingers skipped up and parted through my hair and lowered my lips to hers, and her husky timbre took the breath from me, "_You will take care of me._ I love you, Edward."

My arms doubled up over her back. "_Jesus, Isabella. _I've waited so long for this… it's… It hurts." I pulled back to rub my chest, "My heart hurts more than it ever did."

"_Shhhh,"_ she kissed over my fingers and between my knuckles until I unbent into her, and we were sewn together in near silence. In reverence. In newness. _Innocence._ Knowing, not owning… losing, too.

_Gaining, but letting go._

Once toppled to the Oriental carpet on Carlisle's floor, twice defiling his desk, laid out with a wrap binding us together, our hands foraged to each other's beating hearts. Our breaths matched.

Our eyes met, our lips touched. _Love _was unspoken.

Our love had been earned.

_**~~Just Right… almost… nearly~~**_

"A century of years.

A curse, a hex, a blessing, a charm, a touch.

Three days to kill, three days to live.

Nightmares and dreams,

Drawings,

Reams and reams…

A face sought.

A woman known,

A seed sown."

_Here heres and toasts went up all around until Bella spanned the dining room with a visionary blue airless quilt._

"Go on**, **my _love_," I made sure to silence my mother, my brethren, my sisters.

Renee and Charlie held hands under the table, but I'd given Isabella the space to stand away from me.

She was opposite, watching my reaction with every word.

"An immortal

_A man._

Made by my hand.

The gift of Edward is not mine,

Yet, I'll love him, take him, hold him," she smiled and tears dripped down her cheeks.

I tried _so hard _not to reach out and hold those salty drops.

I failed.

I rounded the table and stood to her left and took her hand and married our fingers and listened to her poetry of love, _and life._

Steadfastly, Bella looked to each person, touching them with her eyes, "He was of you."

So strong, she rolled back her shoulders and lifted her chin, "Now he is ours."

'_I'll never take him away,' _she whispered.

Using my thumbs to dry her face, I kissed her long with a deep sweep of my tongue.

Our foreheads met and crystal tinkled and giggles lifted and…

"_I love you."_

Jasper and Emmett and I were linked from before. _Me, Whit and Carty, once boys at our ease, captured on creased paper, tucked in a drawer._

Alice had branded my mind; she'd watched over me.

Esme was not my mother, but she was my closest ally.

Carlisle would be my father. In addition to Edward John.

Rosalie was my accomplice… she had always imagined more for herself.

Her hope lived with my regeneration.

Eliza…

_Eliza._

"Excuse us, please," I said to the group.

Upstairs, Bella set me free. Liberated of longing and prideful injury… and clothing.

A dying votive cast its ashes about, and its smoke told of the cremains I'd conflagrated.

_She lit me on fire. _

All was midnight. Stars shook and shimmered outside. Branches slapped the window casing. Cold air sought to get inside, its whistle wedging a shrill voice to the sills.

"It's called life, Edward," Bella propped up above me, always taken with my heart, as I was with hers.

I listened to the universe spreading its flow around her.

I tied her hands behinds her, covering up my shaky laugh of, "_Well, it's damn scary."_

"Hmmm," she hummed, ramping her hips to mine, "This isn't scary… _although you are big."_ A grin took her lips up, and I licked the line that catapulted up.

"Just like a boy," she sassed.

I dashed her hands up to the headboard and righted on top of her, making sure she felt my cock, "Any other… _boy?_"

"I mean," Bella panted as I slid right up and down her pussy, tapping her clitoris and lining the slice of her hips, "You can still… _fuck._"

"Yes, I can." I dipped into her a small bit, and took myself out, watching the pearly drops wash down my dick.

"Your prowess knows no bounds," she was being cheeky, her breasts the prettiest hills topped by carnal drops, pushed up, her tits begging for a suck.

"Are you teasing me?" I stopped three inches in.

Her breath halted and her hips hitched, her thighs fell all the way apart.

She drew up, let me slide out, stole me onto my back and shoved down on top of my cock until we both bottomed out.

Brusque gasps landed between each beat of her sex suctioning down my dick, white drips layering between us, "Think you're pretty powerful, do you?"

Her hands smattered down my chest and her fingers traipsed along my stomach, her eyes opened, and her lips gave out a rumbly, "_Yeah… YES!"_

Every light pushed out the walls, and we wailed as I came and my rivers of seed mixed with Bella's, and all was unseeing.

Shards, muscles, bites, _muscles,_ kisses and teeth and hips and grinding together in the last moments while breath escaped, and our lungs lost air and our hips hit so hard there would be aches the next day.

Together, we breathed. I reached down and covered us up. Bella squirmed to my side.

Her ring scraped up my forearm.

That pale pear-toned diamond. Green like my eyes, ivy like my mother's.

When I held her hand, braided together like our legs, our bodies, to match… my father's, Edward John's, signet was upon my finger.

_We were married this way._

My words came out, first hard and strained, then lush… _loving._

"She came to me,

In a dream.

My heart had lain awake,

And when she touched me, I did quake.

Night drew curtains…

Chains bound me.

Everything I'd known, foundered.

Nest, fled.

Sun, red.

She happened with footsteps

Feeling like feathers.

Seventeen years.

And dreams and dreams.

Saved and taken,

_No more forsaken,_

Only, _always, _known_._"

When her breasts topped my chest and my hands knotted to her bottom, and her breath pelted and our love locked us together with gold and platinum… I clasped our rings together.

_Grasped_, together.

"What do we do now?"

Bella smiled, _"We live_… I think._"_

_

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_

~Well? Were you worried just a little bit? Please stay tuned for the epilogue, it's the clincher ;)~

Hey! There's a new blog in town…it's for the _Rebelward Without a Cause _outtakes…and the lovely and sinful ROBZSINGER made a gorgeous video for it, so check it out (link on my profile) or:

rebelward . wordpress . com /


	14. After Life

To my betas, both divine—Viola Cornuta and Vanessarae—they managed to get me to hold this thing together. So many thanks, loves.

Disclaimer: I hold no copyright over this. I thank Miss SM for allowing me to delve into her characters.

~~This is the end of _Youth without Age, Life without Death_ (both my story, and the fairy tale I borrowed from in writing it)~~

All italicized passages are taken from Youth Without Age and Life Without Death by Petre Ispirescu (links at the bottom).

Song:

_Redwings, _Guillemots

**www . youtube . com / watch?v=xTOpt-2DlnM&feature=related**

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**Youth without Age and Life without Death**

**Epilogue: After Life**

_**~~Visitation~~**_

_He amused himself in the golden palace, lived in peace and quiet with his wife and her sisters, enjoyed the beauty of the flowers, and the sweet, pure air. He often went hunting; but one day, while pursuing a hare, he shot two arrows at it without hitting the animal. Angrily chasing it he discharged a third arrow, which struck it, but in his haste the luckless man had not noticed that he had passed through the Valley of Lamentation while following the game.  
_

_He picked it up and turned toward home, but was suddenly seized with a longing for his father and mother. He did not venture to speak of this wish to his wife, yet by his grief and restlessness both she and her sisters instantly perceived his condition.  
_

_"Oh! luckless prince, you have passed through the Valley of Lamentation," they said in terror._

_"I did so, my dear ones, without meaning to be so imprudent, but now the longing to see my parents is killing me! Yet I can not forsake you. I have already spent several days with you and have no cause to complain. So I'll go and see my parents once more, and then come back to you, never to leave you again."  
_

_"Do not quit us, beloved prince! Your parents died two or three hundred years ago, and if you go, we fear you yourself will never return; stay with us, for a presentiment of evil tells us that you will perish!"_

_~Youth Without Age and Life Without Death_

"_And now he lives…"_

Corporeal death had not been force enough to halt us.

We were yet together and of this plane, though ours was a timeless, milky existence with ghostly membranes separating us from the living.

Of body still to each other, we held together and unclothed the other with hands that had never disappeared, with a sensual current holding more power than the tangible pulse of hearts we'd left beating on the cots of the infirmary in nineteen hundred and eighteen.

Smiling, I guided his handsome face-captured as it had been in the final, vibrant dashes of life before mortality had cut us loose- down to my bosom. His hungry tongue never waned nor deviated from its thick, warm path from one orb's peak to the other.

Uncontainable, unearthed, we celebrated our son's new creation with another meeting of flesh unto flesh. Desire flashing to arcane passion. Wisps of ether willowed around us and bent like the softest flax against our bared bodies that floated up in life-giving gales of wind. Set apart, as if on wings.

His mustache lowered to my stomach, across my hips, down to the mound of my want. Tickling, tangling in the nest of hair.

My fingers ran through his dark hair, onto his shoulders whose strength had never fled, over his chest and to the strongest, hottest, hardest part of him. Shuddering, he clapped my hands behind my back, "I'm not done with you yet, wife."

I blinked, slyly pursing my mouth and blowing across his cheek, rubbing my chin into his manly torso, licking at what delicious expanse I could reach, "You would take me in hand, husband?"

My satyr, my lover, my match in all things—my mate, my man—bit down on the swollen pinpoint of flesh he unhooded with his aristocratic nose, "Take you… in my mouth, between my lips," he spread my legs eagerly, teasing me wantonly with his long shaft, "between my hips, Mrs. Masen."

He waited mercilessly until I slammed up against him with all my might, mashing our forms together, making him groan and thrust inside with the quickest, most delicious movement.

Every lunge bent me further back and the wash of the gossamer void enclosed us in a spiral of plumate softness that could never supplant our ferocious love.

Finally, _endlessly_, we soared up in a howling coil of breasts and breaths, legs and thighs and hands clenching-caressing-touching, knowing, _knowing_. Tight and together, _entwined forever_, we dove back down, wildly shouting enough the cracks in the cocoon parted to let in true light, true _life_, "Edward John!"

"Eliza!" He moaned a final time into my lips while I sipped at his exclamation, undone with ecstasy, "_Eliza Anatolia… _mine."

_**~~Initiation~~**_

_All the entreaties of the three ladies, as well as those of the horse, were unable to quiet the young hero's longing for his parents, which was fairly consuming him alive.  
_

_At last the horse said: "If you don't listen to me, master, whatever happens to you will be your own fault. I'll tell you something, and if you accept my condition, I'll take you back."  
_

_"I'll accept it with many thanks," replied the prince; "let me hear it."  
_

_"As soon as you reach your father's palace you will dismount, but I am to return alone in case you stay even an hour."  
_

_"Be it so," the prince agreed.  
_

_They made their preparations for the journey, the prince embraced the ladies and after having bade them farewell he rode away, but they sobbed and wept bitterly when he left them._

_They reached the country which had once been the kingdom of the Scorpion Witch, but found cities there; the woods had become fields; the prince questioned one person and another about the Scorpion Witch and her house, but they answered that their grandfathers had heard from their great, great grandfathers that such silly tales had once been told.  
_

_"How is that possible!" replied the prince, "I came through this region myself only a short time ago," and he told them all he knew._

_He was mine._

I hung back from the doorway to peer inside.

I still thought it was so fucking awesome, even three years later, that he couldn't hear my sneaky approach, that he didn't know I was in the house by my presence alone. _Now I could watch him._

_Yeah_, if he was concentrating, he could definitely work out my whereabouts… but right now, Edward was deeply focusing on something else.

What felt like mere fucking seconds had passed so quickly.

We'd been locked in some sort of inertia before: me waiting, him wandering.

First, _well_, Edward's entire goddamn life—as a human—then his search for me, my wait for him, the very short days when we'd found our love, the hateful hours when I'd thought he was dying…

Then eternity had spit him out and time traipsed on, pulling us both with it.

He was still so fair. But the cold of weather and pleasure now bit at the crest of his cheeks and made them pink. Sex turned his body to a gorgeous blush; the rosy tips of his ears when he came always called for a nibble and taste. _His body… _oh, Christ! Edward's body remained strong and muscled and more than capable of tearing a foe limb from limb.

The differences were small with each year piling up: crinkly laugh lines about his eyes that made him more handsome. Hair that needed to be cut though he kept it a little bit shaggier. That color, the copper-penny hue never faded. Its silky feel never became coarse.

Just last night I'd toppled him to our bed and held his jade-gold eyes with mine while I undressed us both, almost shredding his shirt to get the motherfucking thing off him.

Naked and sexy as hell, Edward started to chuckle when I'd attacked his chest.

"You think this is funny?" I lowered my cunt above his face just enough so he could reach up and slide his tongue over my wetness, then I rose up, hovering, loving the gasps that heaved through his taut, tempting sinews.

Brusquely, he'd grabbed my waist and hauled me down, making love to my lips, mangling the pillows with every shove of his head up into me. Chin covered in clear trails of wet, lips bright berry red, he'd pulled and shook his head and slurred up into me… _braising me with his teeth, melding his mouth absolutely to my pussy._

As if my orgasm had relieved him, Edward had loosely smiled, bending his arms behind his head, looking down his long body at me as I ranged and writhed over him.

"You think _this_ is funny?" A warm paint of saffron birthed from me, its haze like the last vivid notes of a sunset.

Holding his dick in my hand, I smiled at the wonderful throbbing weight of it as it leapt in my palm.

"No," his forearms tensed and his clean, sharp jaw clamped down.

"_Hmmm,_" I blew up and down his shaft and watched the pink, marbled concoction react with thick drops of cum racing from dark tip.

I licked the uppermost one and waited.

Harsh and strained, he'd joined his hands over his eyes, "_Fuck!_ Isabella, _please._"

I gave him head slowly, loving the heftiness of his cock in my hands, between my lips, down my throat; watching the striations of his sinews. Sinuously, he rolled up into me, deliriously unable to keep his hands still, _pleading_ with me to let him cum in my mouth.

Lowering over him, spellbound by his biceps bulging and his throat swallowing, his mouth opening silently, I gyrated until my clit met his pubic bone and his balls were sunk against my ass.

My elbows to the side of his head and my tits brushing back and forth across his lips, I'd slid back onto him, fully fucking him. I'd sucked the ropey muscle where his neck and shoulder met into my mouth to his crazed, "What are you-" I'd sliced against his skin with my teeth, silencing him as his back arched up and he yanked down on my waist, winding up into me.

Hasps and locks and locked to each other, licking and fucking and sweating against the other, kissing and licking and hissing, I'd stopped to take the struggle of his tongue between my lips and struck our hips together, "Marking you as mine, so every woman out there knows you're taken, that you have a fiancée, and that you let her do wicked," I spun my hips, "naughty," I grabbed his ass, "sexy things to you."

He'd pushed me over with green flashing to amber in his eyes, risen up on his arms, knocked off all the pillows and covers and anything, _everything_ between us disintegrated with the savage, greedy fucking he began.

_Join-pulse-jerk-breathe-take._

_Join._

We'd woken—I wondered how many more years it'd take to get used to these ideas: Edward sleeping, Edward eating… _Edward needing me_—on the floor, half under the Victorian bed.

Back in the hallway, relinquishing thoughts of last night… I must have sighed or moaned or shifted, because Edward looked up through his long lashes, stilling his hands, seeing me.

Pushing open the door, I walked into the chamber.

Outfitted in sturdy furniture of years past, the study reflected who he was, where he'd been, what he was becoming.

With all his money and all his memories… with all my fortunes made in body instead of bank vaults, this little house of ours was both bursting at the seams and a cozy haven.

Negligently, Edward dropped the... _cards_?...he'd been shuffling like an accordion between his hands. Unseemly, his lids lowered, his eyes became hungry umber, his face a taut mask of hedonism working up from my bare toes to my little skirt, and over my top that left my shoulders bared. He stood and stalked me, a heated, horny vision of pure want; a vein flicked against his temple where reddish sideburns grew longer than they used to, and his ruddy lips widened, his sight landing briefly at my neck to settle on my lips that were already parting for him.

I felt like prey.

I was hunted down.

Flitting away, I looked through the sheaves he'd discarded, folding out the rumpled edges.

He came at me with clashing intent.

My pussy warmed and became wet, readying.

His hands guided me back, his cock thoroughly rigid and right against my ass.

"You've been sketching."

"_Mmmm,_" he hummed into my nape.

_Everyone_. It wasn't just me he was afraid of losing any longer. Lieselotte… of dandelion hair—pale like him, the aberrant gypsy.

He braided through my tendrils, lifted them off my neck, touched my shoulders with fingertips and lips.

There was Eliza with her coronet of red hair and her colorful ornaments, a bouquet brought to her mouth. Edward John with keen eyes made kind.

"I love you, Isabella," he coupled his fingers over my breasts and pinched my nipples, gathered my waist. He wanted to distract me, make me turn away from these portraits he made in a delirium only to ball-up and toss out.

I saved all of them.

_Esme in seamed stockings… her belly ripe. Carlisle with a cravat instead of a tie; dapper… the ache of his being wielded in his expression. Rosalie… cradling a baby with ribbons tied all around them. Alice and Jasper joined with their foreheads fitting above and their hands linked below._

_My own mom and dad at the moment they knew… that exact moment they stopped feeling guilty and gave up the past._

And always, me.

Me and Edward.

I was blinded by what I saw next.

Life beginning, life ending… the links of the chain that would keep us of this earth even when we departed.

I tried to blink away my tears.

"I worry about them… when I'm gone." His slatey tone was shales of loss.

"I know," I sheltered him within me.

"I love you, Edward," He was pure mass around me, but my iridescence fledged a stark carnelian, colluding with our emotions.

"I want to give them something… _to keep_." He turned me around, framed my face, kissed me solemnly. _To have and hold._

"We will."

_We would._

_Love like this didn't end because bodies egressed._

_Love like this would remain inviolate._

"That's not all I was doing," sliding his fingers through mine, Edward sat at the desk and had me on his lap.

"Oh, really?" I snuggled deeper back against his hips.

His arms around me, he took up the deck of playing cards and flipped them from one hand to the other, at first casually, then with increasing fascinating quickness until all I saw was a blur of motion that finally stopped with a final snap of the last one coming to rest on top of the others.

"Card tricks, Edward?" I grinned as he beamed and became all showmanship, all flirtation. His deep voice pure suggestion against my ear, "Come one, come all," he slipped one hand between my thighs so they looped open over his knees.

With a flash of suits, he miraculously revealed the Jack of Hearts from behind my other ear. As I turned with an amused question, he made the Jack disappear only to pull him up with the Queen out from under my bottom.

I rolled my eyes at his entertainment, suspecting the next of his tricks would include him fishing the ace out from between my tits. He winked and smirked at me, the dimple in his cheek displayed.

"You used to do this at the fair."

He nodded.

"Hope you didn't prey on unsuspecting young women by magicking cards from inside _their _clothes."

He laughed, "Only you make me feel like playing dirty, _Isabella._" With that sensual utterance, he did as I'd foreseen by turning me sideways, parting my shirt's buttons, and lowering his mouth to grab the edge of a final card from inside my cleavage. His face stayed down long enough he could lick my skin as a rush of chills lashed out over my tits.

_Queen of Hearts._

"Show off." I breathily berated him.

"_Mmmm,_" he hummed up to the nape of my neck, his full lips lusciously kissing a long, wet trail. "And what have you got up your sleeves, Bella?"

Craving him, I nibbled on his jaw, rasping my tongue along the new growth of auburn stubble, "I think you'd rather see what's under my shirt."

"Show me."

I finished unbuttoning my top and took it from one shoulder at a time, letting it fall to my waist. Unhooking my bra, I shimmied down the straps, holding the cups in place while coyly daring him. His palm strolled down my throat and with the same growl he always had, Edward shredded the lacy thing in two, burying his face to my nipples and his fingers up into my panties, my pussy.

Our lovemaking was slow yet frenzied. _Savagery marrying beauty._

And when we were finished, the warmth of him spreading inside of me, our thighs moist from kisses and sex, my nipples so tight and well-licked they were tender to even the breeze of the air, when our eyes had closed and opened and slammed shut, and our mouths had yelled and silenced, moaned and bit…

When we were a lax, lazy, interlaced mesh of flesh, I felt the beginnings of his laugh tumbling through his stomach and up into his broad chest.

The fullness of his happiness and astonishment flew from his mouth as he jerked back and then sat up, looking behind me at the surface of the desk. With his hands on my face and his forehead to mine, his ivy-amber eyes twinkled, "_You_ are unbelievable."

I glanced over my shoulder to view my handiwork—created with not even a blip from my existential mind while we'd fucked—_a perfect house of cards.  
_

_**~~Lamentation~~**_

_When he reached the realm of the Woodpecker Fairy, the same questions and answers were exchanged. The prince could not understand how these places had altered so much in a few days, and again rode angrily on. He now had a white beard that reached to his waist, and he felt as if his feet were beginning to tremble.  
_

_Quitting this country he arrived in his father's empire. Here he found new people, new towns, and every thing so much changed that he could not recognize it. At last he came to the palace where he was born. When he dismounted, the horse kissed his hand, and said:  
_

_"I wish you good health, master, I'm going back to the place from which I came. If you want to go too, mount quickly, and we'll be off."_

_"Farewell, I too hope to return soon."  
_

_The horse darted away with the speed of an arrow._

"_He's going to die…"_

"What are you doing, Esme?"

I looked up from the stretched wilderness of pastel yarn in my lap where I'd plaited it into soothing, little shapes, my knitting needles furiously clacking to the sad psalm echoing in my head, _"He's going to die, he's going to die, he's going to die._"

Choking and frowning, focusing on the booties taking shape in cotton candy pink and sky blue and pale yellow… _clover green_, I puzzled over the dozens of pairs lovingly matched up and placed side-by-side on the coverlet of our bed.

Carlisle pulled up at his creased trousers and knelt before me, stopped my hands in their untiring creation, "Esme. What are you doing?"

The honey wave cresting up off his forehead called to me, and I jerked my fingers free, crocheting those wheaten locks through my hands, holding onto his skull, shutting my eyes of the worry in his that tided over his patrician features.

Snagging a breath, I wilted back and covered my hands in my lap, "He's going to die."

"Shall we start with my first question, my love?"

"Oh, these? I don't know, my hands needed to be at work I suppose. I was remembering the layette I'd made for _meine_ Annaliese Carolla**.**" I'd thought I'd laid that gloom to rest, that dreary longing for _mein neugeborenes Kind_.

For all that we were vampires, we remained human. And even though tears would never fall from my eyes, I sobbed nonetheless as Carlisle used his hard thumbs to gently round up over my cheeks as if catching a wet trickle.

I whispered with a wounded anguish, hating this selfish, selfish turn to my heart, "_He's going to die._"

Sitting still as a Gargoyle—oh how these men learned to watch out for the wild woman in us!—Carlisle quietly channeled me in the opposite direction, "It's what he's always wanted."

"He'll leave us!" True to the saddened rage eviscerating me, I jumped up, pushed past Carlisle and whirled on him, "He's going to die, and he's going to leave us forever!"

Steady as the surgeon he was, compassionate as my mate, knowing me as my lover, he just held his arms long enough to touch against my waist, nothing but a grounding whisper of a caress, "I know."

"You feel nothing over this?" I was screaming now, only inside myself enough to hope the others had left the manse.

"You want me to react?" His lean legs brought him forward, "You want to know how I feel?"

"_He's my son, _Esme. As much as he is yours." The formality with which he held himself loosened, and he hung his hands and head low.

How cruel of me to accuse, _how hurtful to think he didn't…_ "More than that… _more than that, Carlisle._" I dropped my hand over his hunched shoulders, down to his forearms, "You are his sire."

"This was never for him," Carlisle hunted through my eyes for comprehension.

"This is the gift of _life _to him, not death!"

As the night piled its heavy blackness around us, it was I who consoled.

Naked together, we plied our hands and words to bodies intemperate, tempted to go slower by the mortal fate of our son.

"_Shhh, remember when you first came to me in the surgery?"_

"_I saw you in the street, you approached me, you recognized me."_

"_On the bench, young and pregnant and beginning anew."_

The way our tongues joined was of imprudence over worshipful memories.

Gaining speed and thrusts, aching engorgement and painfully exquisite railing… jostling, tearing, hissing and roiling from bed to floor to wall to the hall.

We were unfettered.

"_The first time you made love to me, you seduced me."_

"_You're… aaaaah, Carlisle! You gave yourself to me."_

"_I do it now, I do it now, Esme, I give myself to you always."_

He did, with not just his grand shaft inside me, heaping up and jetting out, but with everything, _everything._

"_You are everything to me."_

The sun rose, and it was heavenly with giant, billowy clouds skated through by rays of pink and orange and candied colors I would have liked to remember from my childhood.

The only colors then had been my one worn, dog-eared book—_The Pied Piper._

My mother… Carolla,and my brother…Schorsch.

That sun set the day in motion, lifting higher and higher.

An insulated silence secluded me as the wedding party amassed.

It was only after the vows that the shouts of ethereal joy rebounded me from my non-existence, depositing me straight into the moment where they kissed so longingly, and for such a wonderfully long time, I sent up a workman's whistle such that Emmett clapped in my direction and Renee joined me, and Carlisle and Charlie hooked their elbows to one another as if to say, "Get a load of our woman." All manly winks and appreciation.

It was only during the toasts that I did finally salute with all my feeling, recognizing at last Bella Swan's boon to us all; a gift I was grateful and humbled to accept.

She had saved Edward, as had been foretold… but that directive hadn't been solely meant for the children… it had been aimed at Carlisle, from Eliza Masen. About me.

And for her parents. Because of Edward, they'd been reunited. A dark and unpleasant history shoved aside to show the first light of love they'd manifested… as they danced together; they were joined by hands and hips but also by the march of time that mated them together.

What we most desired was coming to us: at Edward and Bella's conjoined lives, the most fortunate coupling.

Jasper and Emmett both knew from whence they came… their people were immutably adhered to Edward.

Alice shed her past darkness, because she had angelic lightness at her side in Jasper. Even though she was haunted—as they both would always be—they rejoiced effortlessly with Edward and Bella's communion.

There was Rosalie, stood off to the side. _Alone_.

Emmett watched her, as he always did. A covetous expressed in his slouch towards the woman he loved.

Even though we were no longer of this realm, we felt_ everything._

Rosalie bowed away with a touch and a kiss to both Edward and Bella.

I caught my young Emmett's snowy eyes, _"Go to her."_

What we all waited for was something, _just something small,_ for Rosalie. The never-mother, their sister, the most harmed of all in this existence where life was static and unbegotten.

_Just something now, for Rosalie._

_**~~Creation~~**_

_When the prince saw the ruined palace and the weeds growing around it, he sighed deeply and with tears in his eyes tried to remember how magnificent these places had once been. He walked around the building two or three times, tried to recollect how every room, every corner had looked, found the stable where he had discovered the horse, and then went down into the cellar, whose entrance was choked up with fallen rubbish.  
_

_He groped hither and thither, holding up his eyelids with his hands, and scarcely able to totter along, while his snowy beard now fell to his knees, but found nothing except a dilapidated old chest, which he opened. It seemed empty, but as he raised the lid a voice from the bottom said: "Welcome, if you had kept me waiting much longer, I too should have gone to decay."  
_

_Then his death, which had become completely shriveled in the chest, seized him; but the prince fell lifeless on the ground and instantly crumbled into dust.  
Into the saddle then I sprung,  
The tale to tell to old and young._

"_And now we live…"_

I was enamored with her backside when she titled forward on the bed, arcing up so I had no recourse but to get on my knees behind her, lifting her more so I could sink into her flaming flesh.

Running my palm down the bow of her spine and squeezing her ass, I shook myself from the sight of her plump orbs, glided my fingers over the hot cleft, pumping my fingers with my dick between her legs.

"Like what you see?" Cheeky as always, Bella looked back and hooked her foot against my thigh, propelling me forward.

"Always," I'd been entranced with my reddened length widening her, and my fingers pinching and pushing and thumbing inside, outside of her.

_Treasures. These moments were treasures._

Reaching around, I hefted her nipples, the heavy globes of her breasts. I came in and out of her with every long wrenching of her hips up and up and _up_ into me.

Under her, I held the full womanly curve of her belly, I remembered to stave off my erotic need enough to slow… _slow._

Each loop of my hips hitting her ass had us both sweating and grunting until she was face-first to the mattress with me riding on top of her.

Our hands clasped her hips and nothing elapsed but lips puncturing a steady ream of curses:

_Fuck!_

_Now, please… Oh-God-damn-now!_

She was heavy and gripping, an assuaging need over my dick.

My arms shook aside her when I planted my fists to the bed and pounded hard and fast, keeping her up, thighs quaking, lips trembling, everything breathtaking.

_Let it go._

"Let it go!"

She fragmented with a scream, flying out in a life-giving carnal color that ran around the room like oil paint spattered to canvas.

The windows shattered... _again._

A half-hour in her arms and I tiptoed across the shards, closed the shutters.

Unwieldy and off-kilter, Bella brought me the broom and dustpan, deadpanning, "Damn this supernatural shit."

"You need to sleep, love."

"Keep off my feet, you mean?" She wouldn't ever be commanded.

A hazed and majestic picture, naked and bold… her womb bowling out, with our own gestation, Bella yawned but sparked up in dusky, violet lights.

"Please."

She looked skyward as if contemplating the constellations, but she relented, "I need chocolate cake, I think. And cocoa. But not with those dehydrated marshmallows… I want the big ones."

She pinned her gaze to my crotch, and I resoundingly answered with a ready erection. The broom aside, I grasped my cock and came close enough to tease her lips with my dick, "Cocoa, then sleep, then me."

Undulating, Bella licked her bottom lip, arched one brow, "Oh yes, Sir."

I returned, steaming mug in hand, to a scene that had me absolutely terrified.

Bella was in labor.

It took less than an hour for everyone to come.

Her companions in the birthing room were me to steady her, Carlisle to attend her, and Esme to aid him.

Angels lined the room with us.

Alice made me know them.

They were silently on the threshold… here and there. _Here_ _and_ _there._

Horrified by the amount of agony ripping through Bella's body, I could have sworn the trials of becoming a vampire had nothing on this testimony of giving birth. Closer and closer with my incantations to _pant-pant-breathe, pant, pant, breathe, _I huddled next to Bella until, like a warrior woman, she grabbed my t-shirt and hauled me right down to her face, "Say that one more time, Edward, and I'm gong to-"

A sharp fizz crackled through the fluorescents one-by-one until it settled on the light in the far corner of the ceiling and blew it up.

_Clearly, no more verbal encouragement required._

I stroked her brow, rubbed the sides of hips that had always ached with cramps through the nights, I timed the contractions instead of measuring her twisted features and thought this was the most hellish torture a man could face: watching his mate in unrelenting affliction with no means of relieving it.

With a lessening of the roiling contraction, Bella appeared to know exactly what I was thinking, "Still so dramatic, Edward," she said while regaining her breath.

I whispered—to Carlisle's chuckle and Esme's resounding _smack_-, "But Bella, it's going on for hours…"

"Baby, they don't just pop out effortlessly."

_Well, obviously, someone needed to remedy that, then._

I was a stricken mess, Bella was up on her elbows with my strong hand bracing her back, the other to one of Esme's holding her thighs wide apart with Carlisle preparing to deliver.

A roaring scream exploded through the room, causing the walls to buckle and roam closer to us until they halted just outside the circle we made, holding us four in our own embryo.

Then, _Jesus Christ… _then, Bella's body parted to let first a silken, wet head elapse… and then, shoulders coming out—one and two. Torso, arms, legs; an entire body claiming life was borne from Isabella!

_Claiming us._

_Our daughter. _

Her matted hair was whorled upon her head and her nose a miniature and her crumpled eyed never opened, but her mouth-that tiny purse—yawned wide with air and then wails until she was wrapped in a bundle and handled from Carlisle to Esme, to me,_to Bella._

Her eyes, cloudy and unseeing, opened.

A blush, a rush of rose cushioned around us.

Bella's hand brought me into the dome of quaint, quiet light, into our dominion, and I nuzzled them both.

I grinned and held on and… _Isabella… my baby…_

_Ebullience, blessing. _

On the threshold, they lingered; those from the past and our family of the present, to regard the future swaddled in so much love.

_I am a grandmother. Fulfilled. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. _Esme was spellbound. "And Adam said, 'This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.'"

_So much more than I had hoped! To see our son, his wife, and their begotten._Eliza worked a spell to lash herself to earth one last time, at her granddaughter's birth.

Renee was no shadow, more glimmer and fortitude as she entered, _"I'll be a better elder than Old Mother Goose ever was! Just look at Charlie, already charmed. Born to his role… another woman to look over, to love unbearably__**.**__"_

Carlisle was right there, patiently tendering to Bella, letting her know with his benevolent understanding that her body was ready to take over the nourishment of our daughter, and that the sooner she began breastfeeding, the quicker their bond would become inviolable.

He hugged me tightly and grabbed Bella's hand behind me, "Many years I've wondered… would I bring his end, could I save him for something more? An heir to his people," he was talking to Bella. _"A savior to my own."_

His hands asked with gentle openness for just one more touch of his granddaughter. With her not even as long as the reach between his wrist and elbow, tucked inside, he welcomed Esme's fingers into his.

Bella curled our palms with theirs, unto our borne.

Her thoughts rang most clear… bells that came through a drift of all the emotion and all the time we'd aimlessly sought the other, _"I am a daughter. A wife. A lover. I am a mother. I broke through time and brokered with witches, knew myself to be one of many incarnations. This life is mine, and Edward's."_

A carillon trumpeted, tolling and ringing cataclysmic crashes like heaven had cracked open herself in a rain of celestial music from the sky to us… the most divine.

_I am a father. A husband. I am… alive._

Later, safely sortied to our house from the Cullen homestead, I wanted them all out.

I wanted to be with my wife, with our young.

Possessive and always guarding, I was relieved to take her back from Renee… worriedI might handle the fragile, wriggly bundle wrong.

Charlie adjusted my arms with a father's know-how, "Don't you worry, Edward. Two days from now and you'll be an old pro."

Astoundingly, as he assured, my body learned this new curve, understood just how gently to carry her.

My heart, however, would never get used to this boundlessness… _I was unfathomably in love with her. _

Even though the audience looked on, I took utmost care to lay down beside Isabella with our babe carried against me. She turned to touch her lips to the downiest skin of our child's cheek, teasing out a finger and smirking when the pale pink lips opened and smacked for milk. "In a minute, my darling."

A kiss to both cheeks and upon her wrinkly fingers and all her miniature toes, Bella wrapped our baby back up and held one hand to both our faces, "Take her to Rosalie now."

I struggled for air, overcome by Bella's generosity**.**

She sat up and readied to breastfeed, looping a sheet over her burgeoning body, lifting it up to make sure her milk flowed and was ready.

Rocking back on my heels, my feet bare, unshaven and wearing the same clothes as yesterday but nestling all the future against my chest, I looked at the most pretty, puckered face and made my way across the room.

I heard her suck of breath and saw her arms shoot out in a ready cradle..

"Auntie Rosalie, meet Eliza Mae Cullen."

I laid little Eliza against Rosalie's strong arms and stood back… all of about a foot.

Overwhelmed, Rosalie shadowed across my daughter and brought her eyes up, meeting everyone, jostling lightly as if her body knew motherhood as much as Bella's had on giving birth… hushing, patting her bottom, soothing her back.

Her eyes landed on me and skipped aside to Bella.

"Thank you."

They filed out, one by one, _slowly_.

Grandparents and aunts and uncles.

They left the house blooming with emotion.

Nested into our bed, pillows behind us, Bella facing me, Eliza between us, the lamp glowed, keeping company with one final candle.

Breaking the suction from her nipple when Eliza's eyes sifted to settle and close, Bella brought me to her, "I love you."

A funny contortion made Eliza curl her face and suck her fist, looking for her thumb. Bella easily plucked it out for her.

I kissed Bella for a long time, treasuring the feel of her lips playing on mine.

"She's beautiful," I cupped Eliza's whole head in my hand, awed by the person we'd made.

"_Yes_, yes she is," Bella yawned and curled her hand over my hip, and we were a warm armature over our baby.

_To leave a legacy._

_Forbears to children._

_This… this was the meaning of Youth without Age and Life without End._

_**~~Fin~~**_

_**

* * *

**_

~So, we have read a lot of fairy tales, you and me, during this story. Maybe even made up a few ;). But, the biggest fairy tale to me-the one that got me started back on this whole writing lark-was _Twilight_. So, I wanted to put something back into it for you all who have given so very much to me (Innocence. Romance, Purest Love...all those emotions to remind us why we fell head over heart for Twilight in the first place). My only hope is that you've finished it with me and that it means as much to you as it does me…~

**YwA links:**

www . childrenstories .ca/Stories/Youth-Without-Age-And-Life-Witho . html

www . polyvore . com/youth_without_age_life_death/set?id=12721442

**Quote from Esme:**

Genesis 2:23-24 (King James Version)

Up next? Dead Confederates, of course. The final two chapters of CK101. And perhaps something new, perhaps something old…hope to see you all there!

Cheers,

Rie~


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